Big Screen Classics: Casablanca (1942)

"A drama that lifts you right out of your seat."

— Staff, The Hollywood Reporter

"Much more fun than its stuffy 'Greatest Film Ever Made' tag suggests, with a literate script, stylish direction, a great song and cinema's most romantic couple in Bogie and Bergman."

— Angie Errigo, Empire

"The most familiar movie in the world is still fresh; it has so many little busy corners to nestle in... Casablanca is the most sociable, the most companionable film ever made. Life as an endless party."

— David Denby, The New Yorker

"Casablanca returns to theaters to enthrall us with Rick and Ilsa's war torn love, while also cementing itself as one of the best movies ever made."

— Sarah Moran, Screen Rant

"Seventy years on, this great romantic noir is still grippingly powerful: a movie made at a time when it was far from clear the Nazis were going to lose."

— Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"Casablanca accomplishes that which only a truly great film can: enveloping the viewer in the story, forging an unbreakable link with the characters, and only letting go with the end credits."

— James Berardinelli, ReelViews

"As soon as the main titles end, you are transported into a world filled with great performances and an incredibly sophisticated screenplay that takes advantage of every emotion you can think of."

— Josh Parham, Next Best Picture

"The film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains."

— Staff, Time Out London

"There are some of the very finest character actors that Warner Brothers could muster and a rich, detailed screenplay studded with an indecent number of sparklingly quotable lines. It is a movie to play again, and again."

— Sheila Johnston, The Telegraph

"Part of what makes this wartime Hollywood drama (1942) about love and political commitment so fondly remembered is its evocation of a time when the sentiment of this country about certain things appeared to be unified."

— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

"A peerless example of Hollywood studio moviemaking, director Michael Curtiz turning the Warner backlot into a gloriously romantic vision of WW2-era Morocco crammed with real-life European exiles and larger-than-life character actors."

— Neil Smith, Total Film

"With an incredibly gripping narrative, filled with unforgettable characters and endlessly quotable dialogue, Casablanca is a heart-wrenching and inspiring tale of sacrifice, love, integrity, and the power of patriotism. The greatest movie ever made."

— Mark Johnson, Awards Daily

"Nobody ever gathered together a sharper, more pungent international 'Golden Age' cast in a more imperishable exotic movieland cabaret (Rick's) than Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis and director Michael Curtiz did in this greatest of all Hollywood World War II adventure romances."

— Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

"Casablanca was filmed in the safety of the Warner Bros. lot, but the cast of immigrants and exiles who had fled the Third Reich conveyed their visceral fear. While the future was uncertain, the resolute characters of this exquisite wartime drama found peace through love and resistance."

— Serena Donadoni, Village Voice

"The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of Casablanca is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans."

— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"The Warners here have a picture which makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap. For once more, as in recent Bogart pictures, they have turned the incisive trick of draping a tender love story within the folds of a tight topical theme. They have used Mr. Bogart's personality, so well established in other brilliant films, to inject a cold point of tough resistance to evil forces afoot in Europe today. And they have so combined sentiment, humor and pathos with taut melodrama and bristling intrigue that the result is a highly entertaining and even inspiring film."

— Bosley Crowther, The New York Times