✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France, Canada, Czech Republic · 2017
Rated PG · 1h 50m
Director Christian Duguay
Starring Dorian Le Clech, Batyste Fleurial, Patrick Bruel, Elsa Zylberstein
Genre Drama, War
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In occupied France, two young Jewish brothers search for their family amidst the brutality and violence of the German invasion. Together, they must summon cleverness, courage, and ingenuity to reunite their family and escape the occupying forces.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
Despite the hardships endured by the characters, nearly every shot seems dappled with nostalgia. The music score is sentimental, with shimmering pianos and trembling strings. But the writing and its attendant characterizations have an undeniable integrity, the particular historical detail offered by the story is not common in films about this era, and the lead performers are moving.
Even when the chips are down, every boy’s adorable beret looks box-fresh. It’s the boys themselves, however, who often cut through the Camembert to deliver a shot of honest, imperilled feeling.
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
For those ready to view it on its own terms, its gentle focus on family and persistence should go down easy.
RogerEbert.com by Matt Fagerholm
The great value of Christian Duguay’s A Bag of Marbles is the degree to which it makes such a barbaric and bewildering chapter in human history comprehensible for young audiences.
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
Director Christian Duguay is much more comfortable handling the sledgehammer superficialities of near-miss action and prankish boyhood than the complicated, turbulent emotions surrounding children imperiled during wartime.
There’s a chintzy silver lining tacked onto every potentially dark cloud in the cloying French World War II drama A Bag of Marbles, a pseudo-inspiring adaptation of Jewish World War II survivor Joseph Joffo’s partly fictionalized memoir.
San Francisco Chronicle by Walter Addiego
This isn’t the first film to try to deal with the horrors of the Holocaust from a child’s perspective, but it’s tricky material, and this one succeeds because it is direct and forthright.
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