Film Reviews by KK

What I liked about this film was this.  There is such a strong convention in film of the journey in which people are hunted, hiding, trying to escape. Usually there's a confrontation, danger, and fighting. In Leave No Trace all that has already happened, and it is left to your imagination; the participants are having to deal with what it has left them with, it's internalised but still has such a strong power to shape their lives.  

Just wanted to say that we read these books years ago and found them gripping. When a film comes along for a book you've liked it's always a little worrying- can it be a good fit for the book? In this case I think it was- it got the tone right, and the characters seemed suitable too.

We thought this film stood out as memorable; it had such an original starting point, very visual. I really liked how the key characters could surprise you- you'd put them in boxes of one sort or another and they hopped out of them! Talking of boxes, I see it's described as a comedy, but comedy doesn't begin to convey the depth of difficult feelings it contains.

Just want to say we enjoyed this so much. One of the refreshing things about joining Cinema Paradiso has been looking at films we'd never have seen in a cinema, even before C19. Not from Hollywood but something from a European perspective, perhaps, or in this case, French. A breath of fresh air!

This is just the sort of film we have joined the C Paradiso to watch, rather than the usual Hollywood blockbusters. It's refreshingly different. It shows an Icelandic landscape, a windblown landscape of glaciers, moss and lichen, and has moments of impossible magical transformation.

I'm not usually one for war films, but found this breathtaking and I'm sure I'll watch it again some time. Bits of it reminded me of Apocalypse Now, it became so dreamlike. There was real beauty there alongside of the damage and carnage, and reminders of how precious Life is. 

This was so lovingly done, with quite a lot of reverence to the book, I think. The 2 girls, and later young women, were really well chosen. It takes a lot of the gloss off the Naples of the 1950s, I have to say- grey streets, colourless shops, the sea hinted at but distant. And possessive, macho men laying into other people and carving out their territories. But all this is there in the books.