Advanced Search Beta »
Basic Search Fields
Almost Peaceful
Metascore
67 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 17 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 15 out of 17
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 17
  3. Negative: 1 out of 17
view
per page
  1. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    80
    Modest, wise ensemble piece.
  2. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Leslie Camhi
    80
    French director Michel Deville has managed to preserve the work's great virtues--the intimacy, discretion, grace, and humor with which it speaks of both irredeemable disaster and the taste for life that survives it.
  3. Variety
    Reviewed by: David Stratton
    80
    A gentle, sad and at times funny film in the best French tradition of high-quality cinema.
  4. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    75
    Unlike any other film I have seen about the Holocaust.
  5. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    75
    Like the work of an expert tailor, it's done with unobtrusive skill, essential warmth and seamless grace.
  6. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    75
    The gently told comedy-drama is more colorful than you'd expect, using wry humor and lively music to keep sentimentality at bay.
  7. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    75
    These are people who are just waking up to life again. It may appear to be the ultimate non-action ­movie, but in the context of these lives, it is the highest kind of ­drama.
  8. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Richard James Havis
    70
    It's a quiet film, shunning melodrama and political polemic. Instead, it opts for a human touch, conveying how a group of very different survivors come to terms with the past and plan a future in their own unique ways.
  9. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    70
    Deville gently reveals that they're all simultaneously hauntingly fragile and amazingly resilient, their smiles as piercing as any resigned gaze.
  10. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    70
    The film was adapted from a 1993 novel by Robert Bober, who drew on his own childhood experiences, and as it unwinds, one begins to appreciate Deville's desire to see things work out well for these people.
  11. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    70
    Succeeds as a delicately moving memory piece about a subject not often put on film: the process of moving on into ordinary life after surviving the Holocaust.
  12. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    70
    It takes talent to make audiences care about ordinary people doing ordinary things, just as it takes guts to end a movie with something as corny as the sounds of children playing.
  13. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    70
    There's something rather lovely about the mood and intentions of Michel Deville's French movie.
  14. The New Republic
    Reviewed by: Stanley Kauffmann
    70
    The most pleasant aspect of the picture is its relish of the moment in which it is set. Deville doesn't omit mention of the anti-Semitism in postwar France; still, this little tailoring shop is a good place to have reached after the preceding years.
  15. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Andrea Gronvall
    70
    In its embrace of human imperfection the movie recalls with elegant formal simplicity the populist threads of 30s French cinema.
  16. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Noel Murray
    50
    Too many of these characters behave like they just stepped out of a Noel Coward production.
  17. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Megan Lehmann
    25
    Presumably, Deville wants to show life returning to normal after WWII, but in the context of this inert movie, "normal" equals "tedious."
prev next
Page:
  • 1