"To Russians this may all mean something. As a pictorial historical record…it may also mean something, but to the average American, unless he be an out-and-out red, it doesn't mean a damn."
-- Variety (December 8, 1926), anthologized in the book, The Critics Were Wrong: Misguided Movie Reviews and Film Criticism Gone Awry (1996)

" Potemkin is still regarded by many art historians as one of the greatest…motion pictures ever made. But the mystique of montage has been reduced over the years from an imperative to an option. Modern movie aestheticians have begun paying more attention to the content of the shots, even in Potemkin."
-- Andrew Sarris, Foreign Affairs (1991)

"Potemkin…has achieved such an unholy eminence that few people any longer dispute its merits. Great as it undoubtedly is, it's not really a likable film; it's amazing, though -- it keeps its freshness and its excitement, even if you resist its cartoon message…[It] looks astonishingly like a newsreel, and the politically naïve have often taken it as a 'documentary.' The more knowing have a graceful euphemism: Eisenstein, they say, 'sacrificed historical facts for dramatic effect.'"
-- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (1992)

"The propagandist purpose in Eisenstein's films diminishes the human beings… In short, the Soviet attitude to art was as narrow and totalitarian as its political history proved. One is less moved by the Odessa massacre in Potemkin than excited by it: the frenzied pictorial dynamism and the pulsing montage refute the message that cruelty is destructive."
-- David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (1994)

"The fact is, Potemkin doesn't really stand alone, but depends for its power upon the social situation in which it is shown. In prosperous peacetime, it is a curiosity. If it had been shown in China at the time of Tiananmen Square, I imagine it would have been inflammatory… it suffers when it is seen apart from its context (just as The Graduate, by striking the perfect note for 1967, strikes a dated note now). It needs the right audience…"
-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (no date)