text: Most French audiences found its portrayal of the conflict to be nuanced and balanced, and the only disruption occurred in Lyons when an attendant threw ink at the screen.Also, The international version of the film was shortened with torture scenes cut for British and American theaters. In the United States, the response to the film was altogether and immediately more positive than it had been in France. The film achieved a surprising degree of popular success at the American box office, stoked by anti-war sentiments amid the movement against military involvement in Vietnam. In a review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert called it a "great film" that "may be a deeper film experience than many audiences can withstand: too cynical, too true, too cruel and too heartbreaking. It is about the Algerian war, but those not interested in Algeria may substitute another war; The Battle of Algiers has a universal frame of reference." Robert Sitton at The Washington Post called the film "One of the most beautiful I have ever seen" and said it "is just as important for our times as the works of Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl, Carl Dreyer and Luchino Visconti were for theirs." 