macias-5 I am sick when I see such scenario -- Nazis bad, Bolsheviks good. Riiiiight -- it looks like in Western Europe nobody really cares that people were murdered in Soviet Union, and not in one or two death camps. There were established whole "lands" of death camps.Nobody would survive "the escape", because people coming from German side were treated as spies (even prisoners of war). I realize that the move is a fiction, but it should not insult the memory of the people who died in Soviet Union.Soviet reality ordeal still waits for its director brave enough to make a movie showing that Stalin, Trocki, Kamieniew, Dzierzynski, etc. were not just politicians, but insane monsters beyond imagination. That there were a lot of Jews in Soviet authorities but also Jews were victims (for example Anti-Fascist Front Leaders, murdered on an order by Stalin).There is well known story about two trains full of Jews meeting in Brzesc (German-Soviet border in 1939). One train was going from Germany to Soviet Union, the second from the Soviet Union to Germany. And Jews from both trains were escaping and both were laughing of stupidity of the others.The plot was easy to fix -- train going to Switzerland instead of Soviet Union, believable, more historically accurate... So another attempt of Soviet glorification or just a stupidity of the director?

Paul Quote: "Mordechai: So Shlomo, have you ever been in love? Slomo: No!!! That would be madness!!"OK, so there have been too many movies about the Holocaust and there are a lot of people "complaining" about that, but this is not necessary such a movie. It is more like one of the stories written by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and full of the same humor and sadness and irony... it may even be called a comedy, a black Balcanic humor, if people won't be offended by the association comedy - Holocaust... It is somehow the same way that "Life is beautiful" is a comedy, and the subjects are contiguous... It is a shame that the movie does not have an English subtitle (or at least one that I could find) but for the French speaker it is wonderful to watch in its original language. But try to find it. Give it a chance, even just because it comes mainly from Romania, and you are curious what can these guys do (check out the "Awards" section). And I promise you you'll be impressed. Or at least touched.

galileo_contrera This film is good, but I really prefer "La vida es bella" by Benigni. I think that "El tren de la vida" is a movie that became the jews in idiots and ingenues people. I know that is not easy to make a comedy in the frame of Holocaust, but making films like this, I never hope that improve.

Spleen I now admire Roberto Benigni all the more. I don't know exactly what happened, but I suspect it was something like this: Benigni saw the "Train of Life" script, thought to himself, "great idea, lousy script - I can do better" ... then he went away and DID better, making a completely different film based on an completely different idea that must have looked, on paper, far less promising. The films are so different that further comparison is silly, except to say this much: as I watched "Train of Life" I thought to myself, "I sure hope this was written and directed by Jews, because otherwise it's in extremely poor taste"; as I watched "Life is Beautiful", no such thought occurred to me. It didn't matter. A film as good as Benigni's justifies itself.Maybe there's a kind of Yiddish humour here I'm not getting, or getting and not particularly liking. The latter is more likely, since I can see how this would work if it were a printed or spoken story. As a film, the nicest thing I can say is that done properly it probably could have amounted to something valuable. Two things prevent it from doing so. One: we're never as impressed as we should be by the villagers' ingenuity. Take the "communists", who are impossible to take seriously, yet who seriously endanger themselves and everyone else with their random squabbling. Are we really meant to sympathise with people so stupid? I wanted them to survive, but I'd have had an easier time doing so if they'd had some sense of self-preservation themselves. And two: I'm surprised that something with so many close-up shots with a wide-angle lens and such monotonous editing was released in cinemas at all. It was as if Mahaileanu was determined that no detail would be lost when the film played on television. Alas, I think he succeeded.(It was also a mistake to substitute French for Yiddish - yes, I'm aware that films produced in the English-speaking world are guilty of greater crimes, but that's no reason to pardon this particular one. At one point a character tells us that Yiddish is German spoken with a sense of humour, which is a great line - but our ears tell us that "Yiddish" sounds nothing at all like German, and quite a lot like French.)Although the film is a poor one, its plot ideas are good enough for sheer good will to carry us through. And the surprise at the end has the required effect. I'm not sure if I approve of this surprise. It served a more worthwhile purpose than a similar surprise in [a 1990s film I can't name - you'll know what I mean if you've seen it], but it was just as much a cheat.