One of the most popular films of all time that consistently ranks in the top of most lists of the greatest films in history.

Critically and moderately commercially successful on original release, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, while Michael Curtiz was selected for Best Director and the Epsteins and Koch for Best Adapted Screenplay. Since then, it has become most well known for its lead characters, memorable lines and pervasive theme song.

One of cinema’s perfect examples of a film which, as Film Professor Julian Cornell describes, is “popular entertainment but also art but (also) in no way pretentious.”

It is, as the Los Angeles Times described on the film’s 50th anniversary, a great example of “Golden Age Hollywoodness”, with Bob Strauss writing that it achieved a “near-perfect entertainment balance” of comedy, romance and suspense.

The film’s script is “the greatest screenplay of all time” as maintained by screenwriting teacher, Robert McKee.

Roger Ebert noted that “Casablanca” and “Citizen Kane” were two of the most popular films of all time and that while “Citizen Kane” is generally considered to be the ”greater film”, it is Casablanca which is “more loved” primarily because it is “a wonderful gem” and “the people in it are all so good”.

The film marks a prime example of how melodrama, romanticism and cliché can somehow magically work as a film’s main strength. Umberto Eco wrote that “by any strict critical standards… Casablanca is a very mediocre film”, however it is because of the presence of multiple archetypes that allow “the power of Narrative in its natural state without Art intervening to discipline it” that the film reaches “Homeric depths” as a ”phenomenon worthy of awe”.

In recent years, the film’s critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes reads as “an undisputed masterpiece” and “Hollywood’s quintessential statement on love and romance”, while on Metacritic it has a perfect score of 100 out of 100 critics, one of the few films in the site’s history to achieve a perfect overall score.