Havre, Le

Synopsis
Aki Kaurismaki's LA HAVRE stars Andre Wilms as Marcel, a free-spirited, good-natured writer who is currently making a living as a shoeshiner. He meets Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), an African refugee and helps the young man hide from officials who want him deported., Meanwhile, Marcel's loving wife suffers from a serious illness.

Reviews
"LE HAVRE joins Kaurismaki's unmistakable stylistic flourishes with two things that are relatively new to his repertory: an over social conscience and a sweet-natured fairy tale sensibility." (Los Angeles Times)

4 stars out of 4 -- "Alternately lighthearted and deeply spiritually grounded....A fanciful fable, all the more affecting for being so tethered to the urgencies of the real world." (Washington Post)

"Kaurismaki displays a sustained grace in negotiating the boundary between bathos and true poignancy....Its thoughtfully evoked political context and subtle moral ambiguity lend it texture and depth." (Sight and Sound)

4 stars out of 5 -- "With authentic performances from many of the director's regular coterie of actors, it lifts the spirits." (Box Office)

4 stars out of 5 -- "[A] warm-hearted salute to both classical French cinema and working-class solidarity." (Total Film)

"[A] perfect, deadpan, impishly optimistic fairy tale about French tolerance from the great Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki." -- Grade: A (Entertainment Weekly)

"[A] Finnish filmmaker's tribute, in French, to the glory days of French cinema....With a bountiful supply of visual and verbal references that manage to enrich the film without interrupting its flow." (Wall Street Journal)

"[A] tale of lower-depths solidarity, a stylized and sentimental fairy tale about the way the world might be, grounded in a frank recognition of the way it is....LE HAVRE is also a love letter to France..." (New York Times)

"Frame by frame, it's a marvel of lighting -- the images look soft and bright at once, as if old Hollywood craftsmanship had been happily wed with modern straightforwardness and simplicity." (Movieline)