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The Last Metro (1980)

Director: François Truffaut

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5 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Once the Prince Charming of the French cinema, Truffaut latterly carried his talent for crowd-pleasing to the brink of turning into an Ugly Sister. Watching this smugly hermetic tale of the artistic pangs suffered by a French theatre company under the German Occupation in World War II, you would never guess that films like The Sorrow and the Pity and Lacombe Lucien had irretrievably lifted the lid off those years. Playing for cute nostalgia, Truffaut lets the realities go to hell.

Author: TM

Time Out Film Guide


User reviews of this film

  • That's not just the best said...
    Posted on Jun 01 2011 15:39 That's not just the best asnwer. It's the bestest answer!
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  • It was dark when I woke. said...
    Posted on Jun 01 2011 05:51 It was dark when I woke. This is a ray of ssunnhie.
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  • Jean Gaffin said...
    Posted on Dec 27 2010 20:55 Agree with John not your reviewer whose review will put people off watching a film that stands the test of time and make its point clearer by making it in an understated way
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  • Jean said...
    Posted on Dec 27 2010 20:53 Agree with John and not your review who is putting people off seeing a film which makes it point all the more for being understated
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  • John said...
    Posted on Dec 25 2010 12:25 This review is too dismissive. The all-star cast is a pleasure to watch, everyone playing with a light touch. Truffaut’s mis en scene is beautifully constructed, his restless camera work, artful. True, Truffaut on French experience doesn’t compare with Fassbinder on German experience. No Gestapo horrors, no revelatory culpability, no ghastly retribution. It’s well know that the French cultural establishment sometimes collaborated with the Germans during the war and afterwards were silent or unrepentant about it. ‘Hermetic’ it is, but thirty years on, the film stands up well and at the least is an engaging star-vehicle ― and perhaps its hermeticism is more historically accurate than people would like to admit.
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