Zelig has a 97% rating on the
review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 31 reviews, with an average score of 8/10. The site's consensus reads: "Wryly amusing, technically impressive, and ultimately thought-provoking,
Zelig represents Woody Allen in complete command of his craft". In his review in
The New York Times,
Vincent Canby observed:
Variety said the film was "consistently funny, though more academic than boulevardier", and
The Christian Science Monitor called it "amazingly funny and poignant".
Time Out described it as "a strong contender for Allen's most fascinating film", while
TV Guide said, "Allen's ongoing struggles with psychoanalysis and his Jewish identity – stridently literal preoccupations in most of his work – are for once rendered allegorically. The result is deeply satisfying".
Gene Siskel gave the film two stars out of four, calling it "a beautifully made but slight fable."
Pauline Kael wrote that when the film was over "I felt good, but I was still a little hungry for a movie. There's a reason 'Zelig' seems small; there aren't any characters in it, not even Zelig."
Colin Greenland reviewed
Zelig for
Imagine magazine, and stated that "Woody Allen's most irresistable film for quite a while. He has found a new way to make fun of his own neuroses without exposing us to the egoism which became so overbearing in
Manhattan or
Stardust Memories." It ranked 588th among critics, and 546th among directors, in the
2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made. Chris Nashawaty of
Entertainment Weekly listed the work as one of Allen's finest, lauding it as "a spot-on homage to vintage newsreels and a seamless exercise in technique."
The Daily Telegraph film critics Robbie Collin and Tim Robey also named it as a career highlight and argued, "The special effects, in which Allen is seamlessly inserted into vintage newsreels, are still astonishing, and draw out the aching
tragicomedy of Zelig's plight. He's the original man who wasn't there." Calum Marsh of
Slant magazine wrote, "We are infinitely pliable. That's the thesis of
Zelig, Allen's wisest film, which has much to say about the way a person can be bent and contorted in the name of acceptance. Its ostensibly wacky conceit ... is grounded in an emotional and psychological reality all too familiar to shrug off as farce. We'll go very far out of our way to avoid conflict.
Zelig seizes on that weakness and forces us to recognize it." == Accolades ==