Director
Sigi Van Roy
Cast
Aaron Roggeman,
James Catteau-Simonet,
Robin Vanderoost
Genre
Drama
Aaron is at the beginning of his adult life and is struggling with the responsibilities that come with it. He is still searching for his place in the world, while also doing his best to ensure that his little brother James grows up in the best possible circumstances.
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Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
It has the subtlety and devastating impact of Renoir’s prophetic classic Rules of the Game, and it is suffused with the calm, detached tragic irony and inevitability of the ancient Greek plays.
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
This restraint of acting and filmmaking results in a story that's all the more powerful. While many films try to force the audience into laughing and crying in the right places, Au Revoir les enfants invites us simply to watch, think, and feel according to our own perceptions. The result is touching in a way no manipulative film could equal. [12 Feb 1988, p.21]
The A.V. Club by Noel Murray
It's arguably Malle's masterpiece, marked by a shooting style with little wasted motion or complication, emphasizing tiny, memorable details.
The New York Times by Vincent Canby
It's a work that has the kind of simplicity, ease and density of detail that only a film maker in total command of his craft can bring off, and then only rarely.
TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)
A delicately rendered and exceptionally moving reminiscence of a boyhood friendship cut short by war.
CineVue by Martyn Conterio
William Faulkner once made the sage point that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Louis Malle’s Golden Lion winner Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) is a Second World War-set film very much guided in spirit by the US novelist’s musing on the febrile relationship between memory, time and individual and collective histories.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The film was written and directed by Louis Malle, who based it on a childhood memory. Judging by the tears I saw streaming down his face on the night the film was shown at the Telluride Film Festival, the memory has caused him pain for many years.
Newsweek by David Ansen
Malle's film -- the most personal he's ever made -- goes out of its way not to tug on your heartstrings. Dealing with the most painful memory of his childhood in France during World War II, Malle has made a film of uncommon restraint. [15 Feb 1988, p.70]
Washington Post by Rita Kempley
Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants is more than his wartime memoir; it is an epitaph to innocence.
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