Later, in 1988, Jonathan Rosenbaum hailed "Alice in the Cities" as one of Wenders' strongest works, calling it a pungent hybrid of European and American elements "with its effective broodings over American and German landscapes and their ambiguous photographic representations." In 2008, Philip French of "The Observer" called Rottländer's performance as Alice "unforgettable". He went on to say that the film would not be able to be made today "partly because of the invention of the mobile phone, partly because of our obsessive fear of anything that might be interpreted as paedophilia."