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Spore Score: 99/100 · The Pros: 99 · The Punters: 100 · 3 sources
Must-see. Spore Score 99/100. The Pros and The Punters broadly agree.
By Fuzzy Mushroom · Updated 11 November 2026 · The Pros 99 · The Punters 100 · Spore Score 99 · How we write our takes
Casablanca is about as close to universal approval as a film gets. The Pros give it 99, The Punters 100, and the Spore Score is 99. A gap of 1 points means there is nothing to settle. Eighty years on, critics still admire how much story it fits into 102 minutes, and audiences still quote half of it without knowing where the lines came from.
December 1941. In Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco, refugees from war-torn Europe wait for papers to escape to America. Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American who runs the most popular nightclub in town, insists he sticks his neck out for nobody. Then Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), the woman who left him in Paris, walks in with her husband, the resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), and they need the two letters of transit that have fallen into Rick's hands.
Everything works. Bogart's cynicism cracks just enough to show the wound underneath. Bergman makes Ilsa's divided heart completely believable. Claude Rains steals scenes as Captain Renault, the charming, corrupt police chief. The duel of anthems, when Laszlo leads the club in La Marseillaise to drown out the German officers, still raises the hairs on the back of the neck. And the ending at the foggy airport is one of the most satisfying in film.
The studio-bound sets look like sets, and some of the supporting characters are broad. That is about all anyone can find.
Directed by Michael Curtiz for Warner Bros., Casablanca was rushed into release in late 1942 after the Allied landings in North Africa. It won three Oscars, including Best Picture. Many of its cast were themselves refugees from Nazi Europe.
Must-see, Spore Score 99. If you have never seen it, you are in for a treat: it is a romance, a thriller and a wartime morale-booster, and it plays like a modern film.
Genres: Action, Drama, Romance, Thriller/Crime.
| Site | Side | Site score | Adjusted /100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rotten Tomatoes | The Pros (critics) | 99% | 95 |
| Metacritic | The Pros (critics) | 100/100 | 100 |
| IMDb | The Punters (audiences) | 8.5/10 | 100 |
The Pros' sites said 100, adjusted to 99; The Punters' sites said 85, adjusted to 100. Every review site has habits: some score high, some low, some bunch everything in the middle. We measure each site's habit across thousands of films and iron it out, so a 7/10 from a generous site and a 7/10 from a harsh one aren't treated the same. Then critics and audiences each get one figure, and the Spore Score sits between them. How the Spore Score works.
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