Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

anagalilea For those who dont know much about France during the II WW is of compulsory watch. It is somehow a must-see. It is also not difficult to follow and not boring, nice music and has a good pace. I would rate in the range of 7/10.

kiowhatta The problem with this film is not it's relevance to history. It's the continued narrative perpetrated by Israeli's who have already selfishly and greedily hijacked the holocaust as an on-going justification for their current foreign policy (which is criminal). However, in this film, the audience's intelligence is insulted beyond comprehension as the protagonists are almost caricatures and history is told through the eyes of saccharine viewing children. The Nazi's (of course) are blood-thirsty, removed bureaucrats, while the French jews are portrayed as harmless, benevolent, life loving people who simply love one another and may as well be angels. This narrative is told time and again, giving the viewer no reason or context with which to view the history of anti-semitism. The intelligent film-goer will feel manipulated, even though the question of good vs evil is intact. The point that is constantly airbrushed out of history is that Germany was not simply a nation of 'Nazi's'- just as Jewish people were not all Zionists's. But to please the politically correct thought police is once again the more important virtue than representing a complex and comprehensive historical event. This may as well be Batman vs (insert villain).

pieter_delamar I've seen this movie when I was just 16 Years old. It was a very interesting and informative movie. I was shocked while watching it,seeing things I had never seen or heard about. It was an eye opener for me. The movie shows some thing that happened in the war that I know not many (Children) know. Some hart breaking parts which you really makes you think differently to some things. The Movie is well filmed and has a good script in my opinion. The movie was sometimes a bit hard to understand, but my age also had a part in that. I watched it together with my father and he explained me a lot of things I did not know, and you definitely don't learn at school.I would definitely recommend seeing this movie. I'll definitely show it to my kids in the far future when they'll be around 16-18, and hopefully they'll think the same about the movie as I do.

RainDogJr It was Saturday night at the cinema and I wasn't quite convinced to watch THE HUNGER GAMES with my sister. Just minutes before getting the tickets for "Hunger Games" I got to see the poster of LA RAFLE (the Mexican title of it is, by the way, an awful one: LOS NIÑOS DE LA ESPERANZA, which means something like THE CHILDREN OF HOPE). While seeing the poster I thought something like this: "Jean Reno and MELANIE LAURENT really should be a better option for this Saturday night". My sister agreed and we went for a completely unknown film for us; a 2010 French film that wasn't released in Mexico City until 23 March 2012. By reading, later on, part of the summary for LA RAFLE I was quite happy with the choice, as I'm always interested in WWII pictures. And yes, by reading the summary some people would have not been quite interested, thinking of this, in a negative way certainly, as YET ANOTHER film about the Holocaust or as yet another French film with Jean Reno in it. Anyway, in the end I did learn new things thanks to it. Actually, for me the negative aspects of the film don't come from not offering something different. They come from having some things that are almost unbelievable. I know that this was based on a true story (a survival story that's simply like a miracle). The film actually remarks you that everything you're about to see is real; but sometimes I felt like I was seeing a *movie* about the Holocaust, with things that made think something like "that only happen in the movies!" I mean, and here it comes a spoiler, there's a part in which the Jewish family from Paris that we are following is separated: the children will remain at the concentration camp in France while the older ones will be taken to Poland. In their goodbye, the mother says to her son -Jo Weismann- that he must live. The boy wants to escape from the camp and so he accomplishes that. The real life Jo Weismann actually appears in the film; the dramatic adaptation of his escape makes you think that it was actually quite easy to make your way out of the camp. Is clearly a case an immense luck (a miracle like I said) but I just didn't feel *real* its dramatic adaption. Actually the real problem comes when you see this and think in previous situations; it was actually my sister who said to me something like "when the girl (the one who escaped pretending to be the plumber's wife) gave a package to the kids inside the camp, why she didn't just help them to escape if it was that simple?" This is certainly just like having plot holes.Now, let's talk about the great things of LA RAFLE and why I learned with it. It has a very interesting narrative, showing both sides of the story: while we get to know the Jewish families we also see the political negotiations between France and Germany; it's basically seeing how some few people decide the destiny of thousands. Adolf Hitler is also portrayed (by Udo Schenk, who did a GREAT work). Those scenes look amazing, and show a sort of different Hitler too: it's the full contrast with the Jewish families as we see him being nice with kids, having fun with his birthday cake or just dancing. The film opens with the classic footage of Hitler in Paris, by the way, and later on we have parts of some scenes presented as it they were recorded footage… really nice detail. If anything LA RAFLE captures perfectly the horrors of not knowing what will happen and the innocence of a child (heartbreaking material certainly). Also the world of those who served as doctors or nurses is portrayed; Reno plays a Jewish doctor and Laurent a nurse (the film actually has a great ensemble cast of both adults and kids). All of this makes it worth watching material, especially for those who don't know a thing of what happened in the Parisian velodrome that was known as the "Vélodrome d'Hiver" during the Nazi occupation of France (I didn't knew anything about this). *Watched it on March 31, 2012