Critics reviews

While tight on time, [Zero de Conduite] has no shortage of visual flair: most remarkable is the frenzied camerawork and editing that stage the attacks in the war against teachers via splendiferous set-pieces... Vigo’s celebration of youth is something worth celebrating.

A biting socio-critical satire... Zero for Conduct was incredibly ahead of its time in the same instance being exactly emblematic of of its era.

Zéro de conduite does not comment on anything; rather it directly expresses a revolutionary sensibility. It unfolds with the surrealist poetry invoked by the child-like narration. Vigo sees through the eyes of his boys. Zéro de conduite substitutes dream for the analysis of Á propos de Nice with just enough facts of social life to ground its imaginary adventures. Its triumph is the surrealist access to the imaginary in the most commonplace setting, as seen in the opening sequence.

Vigo's anarchic, disorienting vision of life in a French boarding school... Outwardly [Zero de Conduite] appears to be an accurate picture; and yet nothing is real.

The film moves gracefully from realism to surrealism, narrative sense to anarchist disorder, but never veers from its disarming poetic tone. Like its subjects, may it be eternally young.

The [film's] hearty provocation happens as much on the level of form as content: the experiments with slow-motion, animation and trick photography are prodigious and wondrous.

Like L'Atalante, [Zero de Conduite] manages to be subversive, charming and melancholy at the same time and, if it has been so often imitated as to seem less original than it was, it still stands up as a minature classic.

[A] masterpiece... [and] a wholly original creation, the film walks a narrow line between surrealist farce and social realism.

One thing about the Zero for Conduct plot: instead of adhering to a surface scheme, it follows an unpredictable inner logic. Vigo reaches straight into the most personal experiences, memories, images. Vigo shoots straight into the bullseye, as only a great artist—a genius—can. He sings with images that are so simple but that tremble nevertheless with a tremendous inner force and are open to as many interpretations as there are human memories, childhoods.

One of the most visually eloquent and adventurous movies I have seen... The spirit of [Zero de Conduite], its fierceness and gaiety... the enormous liberating force of its quasi-nihilism, its humor, directness, kindliness, criminality, and guile, form for me as satisfying a revolutionary expression as I know.

Except for occasional moments of comedy, satire and tender romance, [Zero de Conduite] should prove of high interest only to avid students of the cinema... [the film's] amorphous scenes, strung together by a vague continuity may be art but they are also pretty chaotic.