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The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Set up myself to watch this DVD with great anticipation, having high expectations from what seemed an engaging internationalist story with interesting characters. Having distanced myself from over-sentimental Hollywood production, I often turn to the more complex European productions. But this was an unexpected disappointment. There were the usual clichés, the usual scenes of old neighborhoods and relationships, the usual stereotypes, the "good" folks and the "bad" folks, and simplistic portrayal of societal conflict. It almost seemed as if it was done on purpose to dumb-down some moral educational principle to a population, as on a mission of historical revisionism and political correctness.

I was pleasantly surprised by this film. The movie is very well made. The lighting and cinematography is impeccable. The scenes are constructed beautifully. The casting was brilliant. The actors did a very good job. The direction was good. Robinson Stévenin and Gregoire LePrice-Ringuet were fantastic. Virginie Ledoyen is also maturing into a great leading lady.Aside from the technical brilliance of the film in its fine classic film making, the movie is about heroic men and women who risked their lives for their country even though many of the characters were immigrants. These men and women loved France and died for their rights as well as for the rights of their families and fellow citizens. There were some controversies surrounding this film due to possible historical inaccuracies, yet, I found this movie objective in its portrayal of the characters. There are no long drawn melodramas here but just characters who are compelled to fight for their freedom and the rights of others. I highly recommend this film.

Sharing, from a safe cinema seat, the anguish of an occupied people gave us a view of how we might behave in such terrible circumstances. The villains are not the Germans but the French people themselves. The real horror is not in the big scenes of torture but the ordinariness of the concierge cheerfully denouncing people in her own building. The French are still living today with the guilt of all that and this film is one of the rare examples of a frank look at this from the inside. I called it a "worthy" film which carries the film-makers problem of telling a tough story but still needing to seduce an audience into the cinema. The Picture House had a very small audience when I saw it tonight.

Paris in the sunshine... through meshed windows. Several normal-looking men and women travelling in a grilled bus. A woman sees another woman wheeling a pram along a promenade, she wonders aloud whether the pram contains bombs. On a boating lake a man is scratching away on a sketch pad whilst his paramour drapes alluringly in the prow. He's not sketching her though, we cut to the pad and see that he's a pamphleteer. "Fair is foul and foul is fair" is the view we are given in this short space of time at the start of Army of Crime, Robert Guédiguian's vital new movie. Marcel Ophüls' 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity is all anyone needs to see to comprehend the loathsome extent to which the government in France (uniquely) collaborated with murderous fascists. However folks are no longer keen on seeing four hour long black and white documentaries what with their absence of music video effects and popular music and such. So Guédiguian has revived the history, and not just for revival's sake, also to counter contemporary anti-immigrant prejudice. Whilst the naturalised French, in large proportion failed to resist the Nazis, many French immigrants on the other hand laid down their lives in the Communist resistance. By contrast, the low point of the entire collaboration was when a twentieth century French police force decided to resurrect the Carthaginian traditions of mass child sacrifice, and chose as their Tophet, the Velodrome d'Hiver. Without the help of a single Wehrmacht soldier, SS soldier, or Gestapo thug, the French police rounded up 13,000 Jewish souls including 4,000 children, who were then shipped off to Auschwitz. Against these existential lepers of the Gendarmerie stood Missak Manouchian and his band of fighters (the FTP-MOI), many of whom had already fought the tide of fascism in Spain.Manouchian is a very interesting character who perhaps received the most character development of all the fighters. He was an Armenian refugee, who survived the Armenian Genocide, which was perpetrated by the Ottoman Army. Out of the silence that followed his terrifying experiences grew his poetry, which was beautiful (based on the example we see in the film). He has to take two key compromises during the film. In order to escape from a camp of hostages, he has to sign a document declaring that he is not a communist. Initially he refuses to sign, but in order to live he eventually does. The second key compromise is when he agrees to kill even though he does not believe in killing, calling it "unethical". It is very difficult for the fighters, they are so full of life, they decide that they must be the enemies of the enemies of life.Please note that there is a scene of gruelling torture in this film, committed of course by the French police.It's one of those rare films that is actually edifying, where you come out with a will to live, a will to do right, and a will to speak out against racial intolerance. It is the polar opposite of the crass and odious Inlgorious Basterds, still playing at the cinema, and attracting over a hundred times more spectators.