It ranked 588th among critics, and 546th among directors, in the 2012 "Sight & Sound" polls of the greatest films ever made. Chris Nashawaty of "Entertainment Weekly" listed the work as one of Allen's finest, lauding it as "a spot-on homage to vintage newsreels and a seamless exercise in technique." "The Daily Telegraph" film critics Robbie Collin and Tim Robey also named it as a career highlight and argued, "The special effects, in which Allen is seamlessly inserted into vintage newsreels, are still astonishing, and draw out the aching tragicomedy of Zelig's plight. He's the original man who wasn't there." Calum Marsh of "Slant" magazine wrote, "We are infinitely pliable. That's the thesis of "Zelig", Allen's wisest film, which has much to say about the way a person can be bent and contorted in the name of acceptance. Its ostensibly wacky conceit ... is grounded in an emotional and psychological reality all too familiar to shrug off as farce. We'll go very far out of our way to avoid conflict. "Zelig" seizes on that weakness and forces us to recognize it."