Alice in the Cities won the Best Film award at the German Film Critics Association Awards.[7]
Nora Sayre and Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times wrote in 1974 that the film has "a great deal to say about Europe and America, about the exhaustion of dreams and the homogenization of nations, about roots and the awareness of time, about sterility and creativity, about vicarious and real adventure and, eventually, about the possibilities of the future".[8]
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".[9]
Writing 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".[10]
In an essay included with the The Criterion Collection's 2016 release of Wenders' "Road Trilogy" on home video, American director Allison Anders described Alice in the Cities as "one of my very favorite films, and a guiding light", and praised Alice as "one of the screen's most multifaceted child characters, and one of the most empowered female characters in cinema to this day".[1] In a review of the Criterion release, The A.V. Club described Alice as resembling "a genuine little kid", and praised the film's photography as "gorgeous".[11]
