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90With a cast of Scottish, German and French actors all speaking their own language, writer-director Christian Carion has fashioned a deeply moving and uplifting piece.
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90A period drama marbled with humor, bold gestures and bittersweet consequences.
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88Though it's not the great film "Grand Illusion" is, and though it may strike some as a little schmaltzy, it still has some of that earlier film's deep feeling and empathy for soldiers trapped in the jaws of war and for the joys of Christmas--for believers and non-believers alike.
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88Joyeux Noël is gritty and disturbing with its extended scenes of war and destruction. It also is emotional, even a touch sentimental.
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80It's a profoundly moving story of -- yes! -- the human spirit rising above horrible circumstances, and simultaneously a work of nostalgia for the gentlemen's war that marked the end, or the beginning of the end, of Christian Europe's world domination.
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80But except for a few missteps, the movie is so beautifully and sensitively rendered in its particulars, in its characterizations of soldiers and officers, and in its dramatization of a nearly miraculous event, that the result is an affecting piece of cinema.
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78The movie isn't perfect – Spielberg-slick, its power is sometimes dampened by melodrama that overstates its message – but it is compelling and thought-provoking and topical as hell.
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75Its sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it, and who mostly died soon enough afterward.
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An intense but fairly brief battle scene near the start reminds us of the unique horrors of this war. But the hokey music played over it hints that the film is going to try too hard to touch us. And it soon does.
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75Carion's cri de coeur is at once a historical chronicle, an ode to the European Community, and a not-so-veiled critique of a 21st-century war.
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75It takes an extraordinary film on the order of Joyeux Noel to make it all suddenly vital, immediate and human.
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75It makes for a fascinating exploration of the human experience.
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75For a few fleeting hours, they unlearned those lessons of childhood, laying down their arms to pick up their common humanity.
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75If audiences are hesitant to believe that the fraternization in this film really happened, it will be because of the storytelling, not the story.
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75The overall saga is moving, the performances are first-rate, the production values (which do not rely on the usual cartoonish CGI effects) are strong, and Carion captures the special insanity of stalemated trench warfare with an unusual horrific flair.
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70Joyeux Noël finishes up as no more than a garden-variety tearjerker, neatly packaged for Oscar candidacy. It's not hard to see why the French chose this inoffensive weepie as their nominee for best foreign-language film, when they might have had Jacques Audiard's far superior, if more difficult, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" or Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings & Queen."
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70Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.
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70The uncomplicated humanism of Joyeux Noël, with its Christmas message of peace, feels at once irrefutable and refreshing.
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70Based on a true story, the movie was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film; some might castigate its unabashed sentimentality, but I found myself moved, especially when I recalled that this was supposedly the war to end all wars.
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67Merry Christmas is long and ponderous, but for a few moments, its heavy hand is refreshingly light and agile, and you feel something other than frustration.
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67Though a painless time-passer, Joyeux Noël ultimately contributes little to the venerable anti-war genre beyond its curious message that to some degree, war is hell because it prevents soldiers from making really neat friends and pen-pals from different counties.
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63Joyeux Noel is no gritty war film; this is more of a Christmas miracle movie, full of melodrama. Carion juggles a large, multicultural cast, and few of the characters stand out; most are there to represent the types who pop up in your standard war-movie battalions.
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60The first two-thirds of Joyeux Noel are strangely inert, but the film ends with a moving and surprisingly sophisticated meditation on the definition of moral duty.
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50You can't go wrong with an uplifting, anti-war story like this, but director Christian Carion trowels on the schmaltz, and the movie's emphasis on Christian values actually seems to spell doom for solving today's conflicts with the Middle East.
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50It's a heart-warmer, a well-meaning movie that sets out to wring a modern message (and preferably some tears) from a famous but largely forgotten moment in history.
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50If the film's sentiments about the madness of war are impeccably high-minded, why then does Joyeux Noël, an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, feel as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth?
User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 9
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Mixed: 0 out of 9
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Negative: 1 out of 9
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TaylorB10