ClassyWas Excellent, smart action film.

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Justin Easton There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

anordall Poor acting, poor story, poor editing. The good guys and, on the other side, the bad guys. A lot of clichés. Take all these ingredients, season with the poorest social vision of the immigrants problem, and you have a movie! Is it possible that the only thing that good-willing people can do is helping a Negro boy arrive in England? Happiness is leaving your country and getting to France and than to England, to become a foreigner? One sees this movie, and the remaining impression is that Europe is dead, Europeans have lost all their sensibility and only can think, presently, in terms of stereotypes and commonplaces. Extremely individualistic, this movie is a faithful portrait of the way people reason under capitalism - one is as important as one million.

Christopher Culver In the 2011 production LE HAVRE, the Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki steps away from his usual Helsinki setting for the first in what will be a trilogy of films in port cities. Always rooting for the underdogs, Kaurismäki this time concentrates not just on the disenfranchised urban lower class, but on a socioeconomic strata arguably lower than them: illegal immigrants. Middle-aged shoeshiner Marcel (André Wilms), who lives in a run-down neighbourhood with loving wife Arletty (Kati Outinen) meets Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), a child who has found his way from Gabon to France inside a shipping container. Marcel decides to shelter the boy and see him on to England, his intended destination, but detective Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is on their heels.In spite of the French setting, this remains a very Finnish film in its sparse dialogue and deadpan humour. Kaurismäki yet again uses a very drab colour scheme and sets the film ostensibly in the present, but with cars, radios and rock music dating from the 1950s. Like nearly every film he has made, there is a musical performance by an oldies rock 'n' roll band, complete with pompadours and leather jackets. This is getting appallingly repetitive. Basically, if you've seen any two previous Kaurismäki films, then you'll find almost nothing new in the aesthetic and even the plot.That said, this is a more life-affirming film than his last, the absolutely bleak LÄHIKAUPINGIN VALOT of 2006. Kaurismäki is clearly concerned with the plight of those who would escape sub-Saharan Africa by any means necessary, and this leads the viewer to reflection, but his exposé of detention centres and police harassment becomes a bit didactic at times.

writers_reign This is reminiscent of Marcel Pagnol's great trilogy Marius, Fanny, Cesar, which was also set in a French port. There are, of course, close to a thousand miles separating Marseilles in the South from Le Havre in the north but both are imbued with a strong sense of community and both address the realities of life and both furnish happy endings. Very little happens here - a group of illegal immigrants are discovered in a container on the docks; one, a young boy, runs away and is befriended by a man who shines shoes for a living; the man's wife develops a terminal illness. A great deal of film time is spent eating, drinking,and talking. The shoeshine man organises a concert to raise money to pay for the boy's illegal passage to England, he visits his wife in hospital. A police Inspector who investigates crime rather than illegal immigrants circles in the background. The boy gets away, the man's wife recovers. It's not unlike lifting a pebble in a rock pool and examining the life going on there. It's a beautiful film, finely acted by an ensemble cast virtually unknown with the exception of the magnificent Jean-Pierre Darroussin as the policeman.

rightwingisevil dangling between political correct and incorrect. but either way, it's very hard to define and distinguish the correctness and incorrectness. yet first, have to point out that this is a very pretentiously scripted movie by a very pretentious director with horrible performance almost by all the actors cast for this pretentious movie. watching those actors played those roles was like watching some robots in the human forms followed the rigid and hollowed dialog to carry out the contract. the scenario was ridiculous and the scenes settings were also pretentious, trying too hard to make this film look like a 1970s production. the people in the film and their costumes were all like what we saw in the 1970s. the tones of this film also pretentiously used old blueish color tones to make it look like a classic movie but actually not. the screenplay borrowed the hot topic of illegal aliens who smuggled into France seeking better lives but at the same time almost ruined its social structures financially and culturally. illegal immigrant problem now is the hottest topic, headache and disaster to all of the European countries. it almost paralyzed and dismantled those countries' societies. yet this movie tried to use such topic to show its humanity by focusing on an African boy chasing constantly by the french police force. in order to show the viewers with some diminishing french conscience, the director and screenwriters even manipulated us by showing us that french police force was like cold blood killers who even tried to gun down the illegal immigrant kid, if not been stopped by the police chief. the french people are now living between black-gray-white situations, they don't know how to deal with such complicated controversial immigrant problems, because after one generation mixed marriage, their social structure has already been becoming dipped more to the gray area. they don't know how to solve the problem, just like the Americans don't know how to deal with the illegal immigrants from the Latin America. that's why last year, we got a movie titled 'better life' to describe the similar situation in America, before that, there were already hundreds movies in the same topic tried very hard to seek a balance point, exactly similar to the problem now spread out in the European countries like pandemic disease, either you accept it or hate it, you have to face it on a daily 365/24/7 basis. this whole movie didn't even ring a bell to me during the viewing, since all the actors seemed to be suddenly dropped into b-level or c-level actors, their performances were simply pathetic. the awkward dialog affected them greatly.this is a poorly produced awkward and moronic movie with a big heart.