Slant Magazine

The Tin Drum, adapted from the eponymous novel by Günter Grass, doesn’t cast the story in a new light, though it does deepen a few of its subplots.

Slant Magazine by Ela Bittencourt

The Tin Drum, adapted from the eponymous novel by Günter Grass, doesn’t cast the story in a new light, though it does deepen a few of its subplots.

Empire by William Thomas

Beautiful to look at, but shot with a cruel and unerring eye, it gives no quarter to the German people for their complicity in events, and in turn disgusts, amazes and frightens.

TV Guide Magazine

The Tin Drum is a disturbing film, rich with black humor, that takes a decidedly bitter and horrific look at the German people.

The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo

Schlöndorff's Tin Drum, like most adaptations of great literature, serves mostly as a fascinating but superficial gloss on material that just doesn’t lend itself well to visual storytelling.

TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)

The Tin Drum is a disturbing film, rich with black humor, that takes a decidedly bitter and horrific look at the German people.

Newsweek by Jack Kroll

The film is laudable, but Grass's book was lacerating. [21 Apr 1980, p.90]

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

The story it tells is so outsized, bizarre, funny, and eccentric, the movie compels attention. [11 Apr 1980, p.6]

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Jay Scott

The Schlondorff version of The Tin Drum is never more than an intelligent reduction and simplification of an enormous and complex work of art. [26 Apr 1980]

Time Out

Whether this talent symbolizes racist aggression or mournful shock is left unsettlingly unclear, however, and while Oskar is a sphinxlike contradiction, Schlöndorff has a tendency to sketch the rest of the cast as simple grotesques or symbols of decadence that are unconvincingly humanized in the final third.

Variety

Adheres to the book more than enough not to disappoint avid readers of the bestseller.

Time Out by R. Emmet Swenney

Whether this talent symbolizes racist aggression or mournful shock is left unsettlingly unclear, however, and while Oskar is a sphinxlike contradiction, Schlöndorff has a tendency to sketch the rest of the cast as simple grotesques or symbols of decadence that are unconvincingly humanized in the final third.

Variety by Staff (Not Credited)

Adheres to the book more than enough not to disappoint avid readers of the bestseller.

Washington Post by Gary Arnold

The Tin Drum is likely to be remembered as another conspicuous example of why the urge to film certain books ought to be resisted. [25 Apr 1980, p.C1]

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

My problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not as a symbol of courage but as an unsavory brat; the film's foreground obscured its larger meaning.