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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (66) | Top Critics (14) | Fresh (64) | Rotten (2) | DVD (3)
The greatest World War I movie ever made (and there were lots of good ones)...
This elegy for the death of the old European aristocracy is one of the true masterpieces of the screen.
It's among the most understated anti-war films ever made, effortlessly humanistic but far too subtle to indulge in preaching.
A model of simplicity and grace, with emotional effects that move you when you least expect it, the kind of great film that only a master can pull off.
Funny, heart-wrenching, nail-biting, caustic and profound, touting the futility of armed combat while turning imprisonment and escape into a microcosm for society's aspirations and contradictions.
It's still one of the key humanist expressions to be found in movies: sad, funny, exalting, and glorious.
Unstructured, amateurish nonsense coalesces into meaning and beauty. The variety show's foolishness doesn't just stand in for the civilization the war leaves behind-it becomes its living proof.
...highlights the absurdity of war, or possibly the absurdity of civilized behavior when war is going on just outside.
Renoir, who invokes so skillfully these terrifying images of disintegration, offers in contrast only the old ideal of man's brotherhood, and his film does not tell us whether it is illusion or reality.
Back in 1952, both Orson Welles and David Lean cited the movie as one of their 10 all-time favorite films. Still, not everyone was a fan: Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's rat-faced Minister of Propaganda, declared it "Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1."
often contrasted to All Quiet on the Western Front which has a similar message but told with a very different perspective
Like Universal's Oscar winner 'All Quiet on the Western Front' (1930), 'La Grande Illusion' was banned in Germany by Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. See it and sing 'La Marseillaise.'
An apparently simple yet notably complex film that uses a subtle approach to explore a gamut of humanistic themes, and Renoir avoids any sort of sentimentality, which can also be seen in the elegant way that his camera seems to float, unaffected, among the characters.
Super Reviewer
This movie expertly depicts class warfare--no, it's not a new thing, it's been around forever competing with nationalism. As a college student in Germany, I had to watch this movie about 5 times and dissect it from all angles: historical, sociological, as well as literature and I never got sick of it. This movie really depicts the utter senselessness of war--how lost soldiers will take up with enemy women for succor and warmth and vice versa and how the officers (the aristocrats of the day, the 1%)inhabit a much different world than the hoi polloi. I am looking forward to seeing the remastered film as when I saw it, it was physically pretty damaged.
Experiência cinematografica cinco estrelas. Um filme que quase desapareceu da história do cinema mundial.
A powerful forefather in promoting a political ideology through narrative film, Grand Illusion is at least fifty times more sensible than Birth of a Nation in that regard. I'm really not sure how I feel about the third act, though. It's touching...but completely without conflict. I guess it speaks to a simpler time in film, where economy of writing wasn't of absolute importance and not every moment in the screenplay had to fulfill some greater mechanical purpose, but it stresses its point in an awfully longwinded way.
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