Nation-states are one of the stupidest and most destructive ways to organise people. We have seen Good Night and Good Luck, and V for Vendetta open little cracks and turn little facets on what it means to resist. And it is worth resisting now. Stephanie has reviewed with her usual elan, but no one with decent historical memory can but see the weakening of public will to resist governmentality like a weakening of humanism: "What are you rebelling against? What have you got?" etc. Not good enough. To agree that we cannot be fully human when the world is as it is, and that we ought to change it; there's a start - the will to resist is forming already. Even post-Nixon films like The Big Chill, which mourn Left Melancholy all over activist agency, presume that no cultural forms will ever articulate activism against governmentality and state stricture as good as they did in "the sixties". Also not good enough. It is a grand tradition in film-making that good actors demonstrate their resistance with little flickers of the face, sufficient to be lampooned in Team America. Ernst Bloch, a funny little Marxist aesthetician from East Germany, once called art a "filament" that glows. This was not meant to describe light as mere illumination, but as the dispersal of shadows. I hope there are others who can list for the rest of us films that work as lighthouses of dual utopian and dystopian beaming. Nation-states are stupid and destructive, but films about, say, my nation-state such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, well, now you're talking MY country. It makes me want to write a script myself, just putting it that way. What did my face look like when I thought and wrote that?

Too often, critics stop reviewing, and start narrating/recounting, often giving away too much.

"the sequence in which Gerbier gains his freedom is deceptively lulling at first, before turning a sharp corner into quiet, shocking brutality."

The movie was created in a way for the viewer to experience that shock as a surprise; the viewer instead watching it saying to themself 'oh, this is where he escapes, there's some sudden brutality coming' ruins the experience.

It added nothing to our understanding of the movie to know this surprise.

Err on the side of not giving too much away.

Thanks to Stephanie for drawing attention on that masterpiece. Whatever the initial reception in France was, this beautiful, darkly heartening movie has been considered by French critics and the general public here as a superb work of art for decades now (it is regularly shown on French prime time TV). Indeed it is strangely resonating now, but this portrayal of human resilience and fortitude in the darkest of times has been haunting me ever since I saw it as a teenager 25 years ago, not in a small part because of Simonne Signoret's superb acting. Her last scene you won't easily forget.

I think it’s unsurpising that French youth objected to this film. A large part of their revolt was against the better-than-us few heros out to “save” their nation. Does the noble group of lone, self-sacrificing heros begin to sound familiar? How about if we make the heros blond, the nation their fatherland? How about if we give those heros a Bushido code and plane chock full of explosives, or make them the Japanese War Diet? Or if we make those heros the French conservative government? At that time the conservatives, the ones getting shit started in Algeria, Viet Nam, etc, had the needle skipping on this heroism and love-your-nation/lone-cowboy motif. Given the events of WWII and the Cold War, French youth were beginning to question the validity of nation-states. To querulously wonder why they objected to this film is the sort of journalism I’d expect from some College Republican kid, not from a reviewer who should have sense enough not be blinded by her appreciation of aesthetics.

First, she discusses how much it sucks when one's pleasure at discovering a movie is ruined by others who've already seen it:

"That been-there, done-that spiel, aside from being purely annoying, makes it seem as if there are no 'new' classics to discover. Everything great has been seen by someone, somewhere, before."

Next, she mentions that the film is just coming out (and therefore people besides her--readers of her review--are unlikely to have seen it yet):

"The picture is being released in a restored version by Rialto Pictures; it makes its U.S. theatrical premiere this week at Film Forum, in New York, with dates in other cities to follow."

Then, she reveals important information, spoiling for us the pleasure at watching a movie unfold and the suspense she obviously enjoyed:

"Even at this point, we don't yet know exactly who, or what, Gerbier is..." followed one paragraph later by: "Gerbier is, of course, a _________".

I guess the "chance for everyone to enjoy the unearthing of a lost masterpiece" is reserved only for the first "been-there, done-that" reviewer that sees it.

For shame!

One would have expected a reviewer who has been writing as long as she has would have the decency to either alert readers to the inclusion of major plot points by the standard 'SPOILER' warning or, to show some genuine writing skill and review the film without giving away specifics.

I expect this level of amateurism from any of the hordes of online posters who puff themselves up with the moniker of 'film critic'.

Thanks for spoiling a great undiscovered film for me.