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100Le Havre is a playful parable that conveys profound truths about compassion, humility and sacrifice. It offers proof that miracles do happen - especially in Kaurismaki's lyrically hardscrabble neighborhood.
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100Le Havre, offers the director's usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message, with a Gallic twist that should win new converts.
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100This movie is as lovable as a silent comedy, which it could have been.
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100The setting is somewhere between a post-WWII Brigadoon and the environs of Marcel Carn classic "Children of Paradise," but the story is as timely as this morning's news from Europe.
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91With its bouncy soundtrack, deadpan humor and good-natured disposition, Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre is an endearing affair.
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90For the right kind of film buff, it's absolutely one of the most enjoyable pictures of the year - and if you've never heard of the guy before, I can't imagine a better place to start.
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90Buster Keaton isn't dead, he's alive and well in Finland, where under a new identity he pursues his own particular brand of deadpan absurdism to wonderful effect. If the name Aki Kaurismäki doesn't mean anything to you, it should, and Le Havre may be the film to make it happen.
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90Le Havre proceeds from the usual Kaurismäkian premise: Things are only going to get worse, so why not just go with it?
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88The achievement of this movie is that Kaurismäki manages the seemingly impossible task of making a farce about farces. In other words, this is a very good movie in quotation marks and a very good movie.
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88Does Kaurismaki believe in his own fairy tale? The movie, a humble delight, suggests the answer is yes.
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Oct 17, 201188For Carl Dreyer, to film a miracle took a single shot; for Bruno Dumont, a whole film. In Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki needs four shots to capture his - and what an ordinary event it is!
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83Kaurismäki is a master of expressive stillness for whom inaction often speaks louder than words, and the performances he elicits are perfectly pitched, including young Miguel's.
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80Kaurismäki adeptly weaves rockabilly musical interludes, a stylised colourscheme and droll performances into a warm-hearted salute to both classical French cinema and working-class solidarity.
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80Le Havre is a small bit of movie magic, a story that plays more as a fable even as it deals with something as topical as immigration.
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Nov 3, 201180The film is especially comforting if you love old movies, as Kaurismaki does: his deadpan humor and deliberately flattened images evoke silent comedy, as usual, and his rosy depiction of proletarian camaraderie recalls the 30s and 40s work of Marcel Carné (particularly Le Jour se Leve).
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80A stylized and sentimental fairy tale about the way the world might be, grounded in a frank recognition of the way it is.
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80Le Havre stands on its own fragile but considerable merits.
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80Le Havre is utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.
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80Mixing together some of helmer Aki Kaurismaki's favorite Gallic and Finnish thesps with a few newbies, Le Havre feels like a welcoming family reunion.
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75Kaurismäki stalwart Kati Outinen, as the old man's silent and ailing wife, is the key to the movie, even though she appears only sporadically. Something in her timid, understanding and impassive gaze, which is Kaurismäki's gaze as well, lets us know that she sees things in the old man that we don't see.
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75Le Havre is warm-hearted and uplifting, without being schmaltzy or preachy. And, with its illegal-alien theme, it's dead-on timely.
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67The film is really a story about community and how it unites for something it deems important. But more, it is a story about mood and tone. Kaurismäki's mordant humor – part verbal, part visual – remains intact.
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67Kaurismäki has a narrow vision, disarming and sweet, yet utterly predictable, and there's little distinction between the films he's directing today and the films he directed 30 years ago. They have the wrong kind of timelessness.
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Apr 2, 201260It may not be up there with his very best, but Aki Kaurismäki offers a reminder that he's a still one of the freshest voices in cinema.
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60No one looks at the world quite like Kaurismäki, and his deadpan sentimentality is worth discovery. This is a good place to start.
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60This is textbook Kaurismäki, neither fresh nor unwelcome.