The films' overseas release was finally approved on 25 August 1943, although it was May 1945 before the film was seen in the US in a print cut by about 20 minutes. Blimp was to suffer probably more than any other Archers film from differing release prints. The original 163 minutes had already been cut by Powell due to a shortage in Technicolor stock. Several versions eventually circulated a 120-minute print dispensed entirely with the opening sequence and ran the story from 1902 onwards. In the mid 1970s, the BBC and National Film Archive jointly produced a new 158-minute print, seen in London in 1978 — which was later extended with help from the Rank Organisation and the Sainsbury Charitable Trust to the complete original length. This version was finally premiered in America on July 8th 1988, opening a two-week season of Powell-Pressburger movies in New York, where it was puzzlingly hailed by critics as 'England's answer to Citizen Kane'.
— Britmovie

"By today's standards, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp seems a brilliantly written and executed character study with period overtones — "the British Citizen Kane," as one critic described it in recent years. But the 163-minute movie was one of the most controversial productions in England during the war, and the disputes over its content and distribution overshadowed the film's virtues for nearly 40 years. ... Blimp seemed as if it was designed to engender displeasure from the government: Anton Walbrook, who was the leader of the anti-Nazi Germans in 49th Parallel, plays an even more sympathetic expatriate German in this movie; the title character, who represents the epitome of the British officer class of the First World War, is depicted as a well-meaning but doddering old buffoon, incapable of dealing with the Nazi threat; and the hero, Clive Candy (brilliantly played by Roger Livesey), makes his name on a civilian escapade during the Boer War, just as Prime Minister Winston Churchill had. The movie seemed certain to attract official censure, and it did. Powell and Pressburger were denied the use of military equipment or personnel while Blimp was in production, and the government voiced its further strenuous objections to the parties financing the movie. Once it was completed and released, the film was denied an export license to the United States until almost two years after the war, by which time it had been shorn of nearly an hour of material. It took 40 years for the uncut version to reach America in its original Technicolor splendor. After the wait, audiences found a movie that seized upon many of the structural elements found in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, with its back-to-front-to-back narrative path. The Archers took the class satire and social consciousness found in the best work of Noel Coward — as well as in the original David Low cartoon whence the "Colonel Blimp" character originated — and turned those elements into something uniquely theirs, a film very wry and dry in its tweaking of British sensibilities, universal in its observations on life, love and longevity in the middle of a world war.
— Bruce Eder, All-Movie Guide

"Churchill's famous opposition to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp has probably done most to crystallise the image of Powell and Pressburger's wartime epic as a subversive thrust at the military establishment. ... if there is one thing that The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp resists, it is being cast in any anti-establishment role. Its restlessness, its élan, its stylistic variety and dazzle have more to do with a quest for an establishment role that is worthy of it. The film is an implicit demonstration of the conservative impulse behind much formal experimentation in art — the anger at what is outmoded, at what has lost its power to enshrine those values considered eternal. ... One thing that makes the film's argument so ambiguous, mystical and difficult to grasp is that it conflates too many qualities — of political ideology and national character, for instance — and assumes that military conduct can be discussed in purely spiritual terms, without reference to political or historical circumstances, or even to technology. ... The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is in a sense playing at soldiers, playing at myths of nationhood. What gives it such uncanny power as a myth in its own right is that it uses its own disrespect for narrative, visual and thematic decorum to create a national fiction that is too 'ecstatic', contradictory and shifting to be called propaganda.
— Richard Combs, Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1985, vol. 52, no. 619, pp. 256-257

"The England which Powell celebrates is a very upper class one and today The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp survives less on account of its overt meaning than for its visual elegance and narrative zest and its indication of such typical Powell obsessions as the casting of Deborah Kerr as all three redheads in Candy's life."
— Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema. New York 1978, p. 221

"Formellement, Colonel Blimp allie la virtuosité à l'émotion la plus subtile, le grand spectacle à l'intimisme et à l'extrême sobriété. ... le réalisme de l'oeuvre est constamment imprégné d'une poésie insolite et presque fantastique. Toute cette richesse formelle s'inscrit harmonieusement dans une oeuvre au baroque sobre et délicat ... qui obéit, par ses mouvements rapides et lents, à une structure quasi musicale."
— Jacques Lourcelles: Dictionnaire du cinéma. Les films. Paris 1992, pp. 311-312