Most critics treat Pandora’s Box as a classic, and the reviews are close to unanimous. Nearly every one comes back to Louise Brooks as Lulu: expressive, commanding, and the main reason the film still holds. Pabst’s direction gets almost as much credit, in particular the close-ups, the fluid camera and the lighting, which several critics describe as unusually modern for 1929. The film’s erotic charge and its moral unease come up repeatedly, as does the final sequence.
The spread is narrow and there is no outright dissent. The one clear reservation comes from Empire, which finds the restored, uncut version slow in places while still calling it bold and compelling. A few of the later reviews, written around reissues, spend as much time on the restoration’s contrast and sharpness as on the film itself, which suggests critics now take its standing as settled and are arguing about the print.