The Criterion Collection

“Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 antiwar film Paths of Glory is a movie that should fail to move no one. I daresay it’s one of those films that forever changes a person,” begins Jamie S. Rich’s highly personal DVD Talk review of the new Criterion special edition. He goes on to praise Kubrick’s film as “a pitch-perfect piece of drama. It’s remarkable in its simplicity. There is no extraneous scene, no off-key moment. The dialogue crackles, and the mise-en-scène moves with precision and confidence.” All in all, this is “the earliest masterpiece of one of cinema’s most important filmmakers.”

At the Turner Classic Movies website, Glenn Erickson calls Paths of Glory “a devastating experience,” “a superb film about the failure of human effort and institutions,” and an example of “masterful direction . . . Whether cruising through endless muddy trenches or regarding a seventeenth-century chateau with thirty-foot ceilings, Kubrick’s visual control is complete.” For Daryl Loomis at DVD Verdict, it’s “an amazing film, one of the best war pictures ever produced.” And Time Out New York’s Joshua Rothkopf maintains that “Paths of Glory is the truest movie about war ever made. Not the longest, nor the loudest (though Kubrick’s stunning tracking shots through WWI trenches certainly supply the firepower). Rather, it’s the most honest.”