Critic Reviews

Safe Conduct -- a rangy, irreverent, episodic odyssey through French filmmaking during the Occupation -- is one of the very best movies ever made about the life of moviemaking.

This is one of those films that encapsulate most of its maker's key thoughts and feelings while also connecting us vividly to a fascinating past. No one who loves French film (or movies in general) should miss it.

You would imagine a film like this would be greeted with rapture in France, but no. The leading French film magazine, "Cahiers du Cinema," has long scorned the filmmakers of this older generation as makers of mere "quality," and interprets Tavernier's work as an attack on the New Wave generation which replaced them.

Superb -- Crammed with incident, and bristles with passion and energy. Tavernier treats his actors, every last one of them impressive, as an ensemble.

The cast could not -- one could almost say need not -- be improved.

The movie is full of juices that give it a healthy, pungent flow.

Comic, suspenseful, romantic.

Spacious, headlong entertainment.

The conduct of the French intelligentsia under Nazi occupation remains a tender topic, and the 2002 release of Bertrand Tavernier's film about two filmmakers who follow divergent paths through the Vichy years stirred intense controversy.

A remarkable and moving account of a part of the French experience that needs more remembering and less forgetting.