Critical Reception and Legacy (Children of Men) Children of Men (2006)

The film opened quietly and grew into a canonical work

Children of Men opened in the United States on December 25, 2006 — a small Christmas Day platform release into limited theaters, with a wider rollout in January 2007. Universal had not been sure how to market it. The trailer leaned on the action beats; the film itself is a slow-burn dystopia that ends with its protagonist dying in a fishing boat. Domestic box office came to roughly $35 million against a budget of approximately $76 million, with another $35 million from international markets — a commercial disappointment by studio standards. (wikipedia, boxofficemojo)

The reviews, however, were among the strongest of the year. Roger Ebert gave the film 4 out of 4 stars and named it one of the best of the decade:

"What is the future? What can we do? Are we doomed? The film is hopelessly pessimistic, yet leaves us with reasons for hope." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2007)

"This film commits the rare achievement of identifying generic conventions and outsmarting them." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2007)

A.O. Scott, in a joint New York Times review with Manohla Dargis, placed it in unusually high company:

"It is, like all great political movies, almost defiantly apolitical, a critique not of any specific party, tendency or regime, but of an entire civilization stumbling toward the abyss." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2006)

The film holds a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 84/100.

Three Oscar nominations, no wins

Children of Men received three Academy Award nominations at the 79th Academy Awards (2007):

• Best Adapted Screenplay — Alfonso Cuarón (in Children of Men), Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
• Best Cinematography — Emmanuel Lubezki (in Children of Men)
• Best Film Editing — Alfonso Cuarón, Alex Rodríguez

It lost all three. The Departed took screenplay and editing; Pan's Labyrinth took cinematography. Lubezki later won three consecutive cinematography Oscars for Gravity (2013), Birdman (2014), and The Revenant (2015) — and was widely understood to have been compensating for the Children of Men loss. Cuarón won Best Director and Best Picture for Roma (2018) and Best Director and Best Editing for Gravity (2013). (imdb)

Sight & Sound and the rolling reputation

The film's reputation has climbed steadily for two decades. The 2012 BFI Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll did not include Children of Men, but the 2022 critics' poll placed it at #170 (with multiple individual ballots ranking it in their personal top-ten lists). It appeared on numerous "best of the 2000s" and "best of the century so far" lists from outlets including:

• The Guardian ranked it in their top 25 films of the 21st century.
• The New York Times placed it on their "25 Best Films of the 21st Century" in 2017.
• BBC Culture's 2016 poll of 177 international critics ranked Children of Men #13 on the 100 Greatest Films Since 2000. (bbc)

A.O. Scott returned to the film for the NYT list:

"A nightmare of bureaucratized dehumanization, beautifully photographed and rendered with all the visceral immediacy of a great war movie." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2017)

The film's prescience became its calling card

The single most-cited reason for the film's growing reputation is its prescience. Reviewers writing in 2006 read the Bexhill camp as dystopian extrapolation; reviewers writing in 2016, 2018, and the 2020s read it as documentary. The cages of detained refugees, the lockdown geography, the public-address voice — all of it became the visual grammar of the late-2010s European refugee crisis and the 2020 pandemic.

"Watching Children of Men in 2017 is a different experience than watching it in 2006. The film hasn't changed. The world has caught up." — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture (2017)

Mark Fisher made it a critical-theory touchstone

Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) opened with Children of Men and treated it as the canonical text for a particular structure of feeling. Fisher's reading — that the film captures the texture of a world in which "the end has already come" — became the dominant academic frame for the film and pushed it into university syllabi well outside film studies.

The 2017 reissue and the building canon

In January 2017, the film was re-released theatrically in the US and UK to mark its tenth anniversary. Reviews of the reissue were uniformly stronger than reviews of the original release. The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vulture, The Ringer, and Slate all ran extended pieces arguing the film had aged into one of the great films of the 2000s.

"It may be the best film of the 2000s, and it certainly looks more relevant today than it did in 2006." — Christopher Orr, The Atlantic (2017)