Z is almost intolerably exciting - a political thriller that builds up so much tension that you'll probably feel all knotted up by the time it's over

"Z is undoubtedly intended as a political act, but it never loses emotional contact with the audience. It derives not from the traditions of the French film but from American gangster movies and prison pictures and "anti-Fascist" melodramas of the forties (Cornered, Crossfire, Brute Force, All the King's Men, Edge of Darkness, The Cross of Lorraine, et al.), and, like those pictures, it has a basically simple point of view. America stopped making this kind of melodrama (melodrama was always the chief vehicle for political thought in our films) during the McCarthy era, so Costa-Gravas has-the advantage of bringing back a popular kind of movie and of bringing it back in modem movie style."