Army of Shadows (2006)

Redundant and unnecessary.

Must See Movie...

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

a brilliant meeting between great actors and touching story. a story about war, at the first sigh. in fact, a story about ideal, sacrifice and profound definition of patriotism. bitter, cold, gray, simple. a story about survive and the price for it. the theme is not original but the precision to present the details and the structure of emotions, gestures and decisions, the construction of characters, the science to give not exactly stories of few people but the space in who the viewer becomes part of events is the splendid pillar of film. because , in a pragmatic society, to remind the value of the ideals seems strange. The Army of Shadows is a precious pledge for rediscover the necessity to not ignore the sacrifices and the force of links with the country who remains, again and again, yours.

An account of underground resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France.A year ago (2014) I had never heard of this Melville character, with the only person by that name is my world being the "Moby Dick" author. Now, a year has passed and I have seen just about everything this guy has directed. Although he does not seem to be well-known, he is critically acclaimed -- all his films rate highly on IMDb and most are available from the Criterion Collection.Whether war, or gangster or noir, or... a pretty decent variety of genres, he has a style that uses color very nicely, without smothering us in it. It's not Argento or Greenaway, but just enough color to be enticing without being the focal point.

I do not understand what is so great about this movie what underground activities they did is hardly shown except references and killings there is hardly any logic for title except the dark background and the lead character who is an engineer.you never identify with them at any point except three instances one where they silence a traitor although he is a loved one two where he swallows a sheet of paper to avoid being caught by Nazis and three at last where he kills Mathailde his Savior the characters introduced also fail to arouse any interest it seems the director has made the film mostly for the pleasure of it.complete waste of time. add to that 8.2 is not the score the movie deserves it is at best a 7.8 movie. People with serious expectations advised to stay away

Oftentimes, critics like to toss around terms like great, masterpiece, brilliant, etc., just to blow their own horns, or to jump on a bandwagon started rolling by a big name critic (this is called critical cribbing, and also involves the pilfering of review points from others). But, more often than not, the real reasons such terms are loosely bandied about is because most critics are simply lazy, too lazy to actually invest some time in engaging the film, book, artwork, theory, they are, by dint of their profession, supposed to do. What happens, then, is that this overpraise boxes a critic in, especially when a true masterpiece, or great film, comes along, because you end up with a pantheon of art that is mostly solid to good, at best; thus effectively making the praise they offer to truly great art meaningless, for it is indistinguishable from that offered to the merely solid. A good recent example of this comes from the 2006 American release of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 film on the French Resistance during World War Two, Army Of Shadows (L'Armée Des Ombres).Simply put, the film is a good, sometimes very good, film. But, compared to other war films, other films on the Second World War, specifically, it simply does not measure up.Army Of Shadows ultimately rises and falls on the strength of its screenplay, which- while not deep, is not as predictable as most Nazi films. While there is a sense of the ultimate doom for the characters, it's the how of their doom, not the why, that matters, and keeps the viewer watching. And, this fact lets the film find its own level as a good film, a very good film at its best, but nothing near a masterpiece. Sorry, critics old and young.