regime of Jorge Rafael Videla during that country's last civil/military dictatorship due in large part to the "pornographic" content that was present in both films. For five years, the film was also banned by the apartheid regime in South Africa. In addition to the issue of child prostitution, the scenes involving a nude 12-year-old Brooke Shields were controversial. The BBFC originally censored two scenes for the film's cinema release in the UK to remove nudity, but the uncut version was released on DVD in 2006. This same uncut print is the basis of the Region 1 and Region 2 DVD editions worldwide. Reception Box office Pretty Baby earned $5.8 million in the United States. Critical reception The film received mostly positive reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 71% of 28 critics had given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 6.88/10. In his New York Times review Vincent Canby wrote: "Mr. Malle, the French director ... has made some controversial films in his time but none, I suspect, that is likely to upset convention quite as much as this one – and mostly for the wrong reasons. Though the setting is a whorehouse, and the lens through which we see everything is Violet, who ... herself becomes one of Nell's chief attractions, Pretty Baby is neither about child prostitution nor is it pornographic." Canby ended his review with the claim that Pretty Baby is "... the most imaginative, most intelligent, and most original film of the year to date." Similarly, Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, who gave the film three stars out of four, discussed how "... Pretty Baby has been attacked in some quarters as child porn. It's not. It's an evocation of a time and a place and a sad chapter of Americana." He also praised Shields's performance, writing that she "... really creates a character here; her subtlety and depth are astonishing." On the other hand, Variety wrote that "the film is handsome, the players nearly all effective, but the story highlights are confined within a narrow range of ho-hum dramatization." Mountain Xpress critic Ken Hanke, looking at the film from the perspective of 2003, said of Pretty Baby: "It was once shocking and dull. Now it's just dull." The New York Times placed the film on its Best 1000 Movies Ever list. Awards The film won the Technical Grand Prize