In his review of the film for "The New York Times", critic Vincent Canby wrote that, "Watching Jamie Uys's "Gods Must Be Crazy", [...] one might suspect that there were no such things as apartheid or the Immorality Act or even South Africa." Though he called the film "often genuinely, nonpolitically funny", he noted that "there's also something disturbing about the film," in that "we tend to feel that any South African work that doesn't actively condemn apartheid has the secondary effect of condoning it, if only through silence."