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Train of Life

Train de vie

1998

Radu Mihaileanu

Lionel Abelanski, Rufus Magloire, Clément Harari, Michel Muller ...

7.2

3,563

Comedy. Drama Central Europe, WWII. The village fool of a small Jewish community warns the townsfolk that the Nazis are coming, and advises them to build a fake deportation train to cross the Russian border and get to Palestine. Some Jews are dressed up with German uniforms, and soon they start getting strange ideas about how it feels to be a Nazi; others are infected with the fast-spreading germ of communism. Meanwhile, the Russian border gets closer and closer... [+]

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	William Thomas Empire	"For all its plus points, the film isn't quite strong enough to distinguish itself from the recent rash of similarly-themed fare (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	NEU
United States	Lisa Nesselson Variety	"Premise lends itself to a fable that’s charming and clever in places but schmaltzy and stereotypical in others"	NEU
United States	Stephen Holden The New York Times	"What saves 'Train of Life' from sinking into sudsy Holocaust kitsch is its sustained comic buoyancy. The movie doesn't pretend for an instant to be anything more than a rustic comic fairy tale"	POS
United States	Chicago Reader	"The film is far more visually accomplished than 'Life Is Beautiful', but it uses the same sort of emotional manipulation to turn the Holocaust into farce"	NEU
United States	Marc Savlov Austin Chronicle	"It's such an oddball assemblage that it simply can't click all the time, but when it fires on all cylinders, it's one of the most shocking, affecting Holocaust films yet seen (…) Rating: ★★½ (out of 5)"	NEU
United States	Joshua Klein AV Club	"[It] is occasionally funny but more often just silly (...) If the film ultimately fails, it's in part due to its many successes: Most will be unprepared to see such a dire situation approached so casually"	NEU

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