Metacritic reviews

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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]

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.

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

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.

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]