Blitz
Apple TV+ | Release Date (Streaming): November 1, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
71
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 53 Critic Reviews
Positive:
36
Mixed:
16
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Original-CinJohn KirkNov 6, 2024
It’s a powerfully emotional story built on a foundation of surprising historical accuracy. This film treats us to a cross-section of the civilian experience of World War II that isn’t typically thought about. Read full review
100
ObserverEmily ZemlerOct 9, 2024
It is both empathetic and brutal, but at the core is a hint of optimism. That despite our human instinct to create conflict, we could do better. In conveying this in such an original way, McQueen proves that there is always a new way to navigate a well-trodden path. Read full review
100
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyOct 9, 2024
It’s a war picture, in the more conventional mould, that feels new and revelatory purely because it’s being viewed through the eyes of its singular director – expressionist yet rarely sentimental, disquieting in its terrors yet tender in its hope, and profoundly interested in the ordinary lives of others. Read full review
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinOct 9, 2024
McQueen’s film is big-picture British cinema, of a scale and depth which hasn’t been seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Both London and the countryside are shot with a classical elegance that calls to mind David Lean, while the sequences portraying the bombings themselves flare with panic and horror. Read full review
95
TheWrapWilliam BibbianiOct 9, 2024
I’ve been to whole film festivals with less cinema than Steve McQueen packs into just two hours. Read full review
91
The PlaylistTomris LafflyOct 9, 2024
On the whole, there is an old-fashioned grandness to Blitz, charged by a cumulative sense of civic toughness and rebellious spirit that always spreads itself over a people, a city, or a country when they are collectively faced with unspeakable tragedies they have to endure. Read full review
90
The New York TimesAlissa WilkinsonOct 31, 2024
The movie bears comparisons to Dickens, both for George’s plight and for the depiction of class divides across a war-torn London. But there is something else going on narratively here. For one, McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just trying to survive. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonNov 7, 2024
The actors turn in great work, but the true stars of “Blitz” are the production design by Adam Stockhausen and the cinematography by Yorick Le Saux. Collectively, they put you inside the Tube stations and shelters that were occupied by Londoners trying to escape the Blitz. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperNov 5, 2024
In ways sometimes subtle and sometimes anything but, writer-director McQueen tells a story that on one level is a conventional tale of valor but is also a cutting commentary about how even as war-torn England was united in its staunch repudiation of Hitler, racism and classicism were all too commonplace in its own backyard. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenNov 1, 2024
Blitz gets a little preachy at times (perhaps another Dickens influence), but there is also a stark honesty about the dread and difficulty of living as a civilian under siege—as a person of color or not. And of course McQueen manages instances of jaw-dropping imagery. Read full review
80
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Aparita BhandariNov 7, 2024
While it may depict events of the past, its relevance to the present couldn’t be more striking. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekNov 4, 2024
This is a movie about the way resilience can blossom from vulnerability. No child asks to be a victim of war; sometimes survival, with your soul intact, is the best possible outcome. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleNov 1, 2024
War movies have always made use of spectacle to heighten existential dangers, but Blitz is a welcome reminder that a bruised, searching and flawed home front, in the waning days of empire, was its own fascinating emotional terrain too. Read full review
80
The New YorkerJustin ChangNov 1, 2024
This is McQueen’s method: a passage of lyrical beauty, a chaser of righteous struggle. You cannot survive a war, he suggests, without both. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerOct 30, 2024
This is Steve McQueen’s most accessible film to date, without diluting any of his power. Mixing epic sweep with textured detail, despite an episodic second half it will make even the stiffest upper lip quiver. Read full review
80
Time OutPhil de SemlyenOct 10, 2024
McQueen isn’t questioning the courage or endurance of the city and its people through these brutal days. But he is probing our relationship with this over-lionised period of our history, though, and finding it hopelessly romanticised. Maybe it’s time, his flawed but hard-hitting film suggests, to lift the curfew on looking it afresh. Read full review
80
The TimesKevin MaherOct 9, 2024
Arguably the most heroic character in the film is the city. And Blitz is, instantly, one of the great “London Movies”. Read full review
80
Total FilmJamie GrahamOct 9, 2024
An impressively cinematic drama that fully immerses viewers in a time and place but offers links to our divided present. Read full review
80
ColliderEmma KielyOct 9, 2024
With immersive action set pieces, heartfelt snippets of character-driven stories, and fantastic performances all around, Steve McQueen shows again his adept ability at bringing such enormous scope to deeply personal human stories. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 21, 2024
A harrowing, moving and nostalgic day and a couple of nights in the life of a Black boy lost during the darkest days of World War II. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliNov 20, 2024
It’s the kind of movie one can watch and appreciate on both an emotional and intellectual level but without having to do much heavy lifting. It isn’t the director’s best work but nevertheless represents a worthy entry to his increasingly diverse filmography. Read full review
75
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldNov 7, 2024
Not a perfect movie, but a truly moving one. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonNov 6, 2024
The landscape against which a mother and her son try to find each other is stunningly realized. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJake CoyleOct 30, 2024
Blitz feels stuck between a conventional war drama and something more adventurous and probing. It doesn’t coalesce the way McQueen’s best work does, but the frictions that drive Blitz make it a singular and sporadically moving experience. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubJesse HassengerOct 16, 2024
Blitz often feels like a pitched battle between the conventions of big-canvas war recreation and McQueen’s attempt to evoke the stranger, less obviously narrative-driven chaos that happens when the battlefield descends on a major urban center from the sky. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comMonica CastilloOct 11, 2024
The film is not just a glossy period piece; it’s an emotional story about human resilience, one that’s sadly still too familiar almost a century later. Read full review
75
Vanity FairRichard LawsonOct 11, 2024
It’s a patchwork that doesn’t always stitch together neatly, but is compelling and wrenching as a whole. The film is also a mighty vision of chaos and fire, of music and movement, of a city churning to sustain itself. Read full review
75
The Film StageAlistair RyderOct 9, 2024
As a blockbuster adventure, Blitz has far more historical texture and a significantly less-romantic outlook than you’d expect from an unashamedly mainstream British drama. Even without that romanticism, it’s the most hopeful movie he’s made; Blitz is also the one most lacking for greater depth. Read full review
70
Rolling StoneDavid FearNov 1, 2024
It’s not Blitz’s sensory-overload sturm und drang that leaves you gasping for breath. It’s the sneak attack. Read full review
70
Little White LiesRogan GrahamOct 10, 2024
Reflecting on McQueen’s oeuvre, Blitz is a clear culmination of his greatest passions, the film itself feeling at once fresh and well-trodden. Read full review
70
VarietyOwen GleibermanOct 9, 2024
McQueen, who wrote and directed Blitz, has an effortless technique that whisks you along. Yet I can’t say that Blitz ever enters terrain that’s morally fascinating or dramatically complex. Read full review
67
IndieWireDavid EhrlichOct 10, 2024
Blitz creates a rousing show of strength in the face of horrific civil strife, and there’s an undeniable power to how McQueen revisits the most visible chapter of his country’s history through the eyes of someone who’s so frequently been erased from its pages. If some of the movie is hurt by its failure to bear his imprint, that only serves to remind us just how valuable his imprint has become. Read full review
63
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiNov 25, 2024
McQueen’s script at times reeks of obviousness, even as it nurtures understated and heartfelt performances from Ronan and Heffernan. We always know where the film is going, and it dutifully goes there. Visually, though, the work’s a stunner. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsNov 8, 2024
Cross-cutting between son and mother, and their constant efforts to reunite among the carnage, flames and rubble before it’s too late, director McQueen keeps the screws tight, blowing past realism for a trickier realm of historically grounded but highly stylized imagination. Read full review
63
Washington PostTy BurrNov 7, 2024
Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” is a triumph of production design; unfortunately, what it triumphs over is story. Read full review
61
Paste MagazineNatalia KeoganOct 15, 2024
Blitz might be a story of a war-torn metropolis and its inhabitants, but even so it feels bogged down by its ever-mounting tragedies. Read full review
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