Sunrise won the first ever Oscar® for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Janet Gaynor (also cited were the two films Seventh Heaven [1927] and Street Angel [1928]). It also won the first ever Oscar® for Best Cinematography for Charles Rosher and Karl Struss and that award remains to this day one of the most deserving ever handed out in that category. Finally, Sunrise was awarded the first ever, and still only, Oscar® for Best Unique and Artistic Production. It was also nominated for, but lost, the Oscar® for Best Art Direction for Rochus Gliese.

It also received the Kinema Junpo Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1929. The Kinema Junpo awards derived from the Japanese film magazine of the same name, started in 1919.

Sunrise has also been regularly considered one the greatest films ever made and in 2002, was ranked in the top 10 of the Sight and Sound critic's poll.

The Critics' Corner on SUNRISE

"Sunrise is a distinguished contribution to the screen, made in this country, but produced after the best manner of the German school. In its artistry, dramatic power and graphic suggestion, it goes a long way in realizing the promise of this foreign director in his former works, notably Faust [1926]... Murnau reveals a remarkable resourcefulness of effects; the playing of George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor and their associates is generally convincing, and the story unfolds in settings inexpressibly lovely... Murnau has a knack or a gift or a genius for broad effects. He can convey subtle meanings by trick photography or by treatment of backgrounds.... All of these things lay upon a story as simple as it is human." Variety, September, 1927.

"Superlatives grow pale... I lack the ability to describe the beauty, the poignancy, the happiness of this exquisite film. It moves, from beginning to end, a perfectly co-ordinated piece of drama - a heart-searing, ironic picture of life, love, and laughter done to brutal perfection by F. W. Murnau." New York Herald Tribune, December, 1927

"The principals in this gripping subject are George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor, who both give inspired performances... This picture is exotic in many ways for it is a mixture of Russian gloom and Berlin brightness...Miss Gaynor, guided by the genius of Mr. Murnau, gives a strangely sympathetic portrait of the Wife. Her hair is braided into a coil at the back of her head, and her big, bright eyes are never like those of the usual Hollywood actress. Margaret Livingston impersonates the City Girl with feline like watchfulness and purring caresses. There is not a weak spot in any of the performances and the incidents are stamped with genuineness and simplicity. You find yourself thinking now and again that it is just the sort of thing farm people might do on going to Tilsit...Mr. Murnau proves by Sunrise that he can do just as fine work in Hollywood as he ever did in Germany. A film Masterpiece." Mordaunt Hall, The New York Times, September, 1927.

"Although my admiration for Ernst Lubitsch is great - some would say 'excessive' - the title of the World's Greatest Director, according to my personal rating, is no longer held by him. It is applied to F. W. Murnau. Sunrise, to my mind, is the most important picture in the history of the movies." Robert Sherwood, Life, 1927

"Not since the earliest, simplest moving pictures, when locomotives, fire engines and crowds in streets were transposed to the screen artlessly and endearingly, when the entranced eye was rushed through tunnels and over precipices on runaway trains, has there been such joy in motion as under Murnau's direction." - Louise Bogan, The New Republic

"A near masterpiece...The story is told in a flowing, lyrical German manner that is extraordinarily sensual, yet is perhaps too self-conscious, too fable-like for American audiences." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

"I think the film was a stepping-stone, and Murnau was dead before he could touch ground. The art direction - by Rochus Gliese, Gordon Wiles, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Alfred Metscher - is phenomenal, and from a far more sophisticated film. The lighting (Charles Rosher and Karl Struss) and the camera movement are glorious. There are entire sequences here that see the medium altering. But the song of the humans is much harder to take and it stays obstinately in place. It's the scenario that is the problem: by Carl Mayer from a novel by Hermann Sudermann. What Sunrise needs is a grasp of character as subtle as the mise-en-scene. That would not come for years yet, and you can argue that it came in France and Japan more than in America. But don't doubt the impact of Sunrise on Hollywood - these are the first modern camera movements, carrying us toward desire." - David Thomson, Have You Seen...?

"If, on the verge of the sound era, the cinema needed a film of great plastic beauty to emphasize its visual heritage, then Sunrise was that film...Sunrise endures as a poem in pictures, the beauty and fluidity of which more than mitigate the essential kitsch of the story..." - Peter Cowie, Eighty Years of Cinema

"Murnau's most perfect film, though made in Hollywood, is entirely Germanic in style. Its style is dominated by fluid camera movements that are so masterfully handled that they also seem invisible." - Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films

"I can recall no other film in which the honest emotion of love has been conveyed so beautifully, and no other film that is such a beautiful entity in itself. Even the titles, which are infrequent, have a simplicity and beauty that parallels the film itself, and often they are presented in strikingly dramatic fashion." - Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury by Joe Franklin

Compiled by Greg Ferrara