A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Delighted to see this film again, which I first saw in 1981, in Paris. Most of it was as I remembered it , but one or two things were different. I realise it would not be everyone's choice, but the panorama of people, events and places is something I can luxuriate in. Still amazed that Geraldine Chaplin has such a smoky voice! Towards the end when characters appeared to be duplicated it was not always easy to follow - I speak good French, but even so, I think I would have benefited from a translation and some good subtitles. On the whole, though, the intricacies of the plot were revealed without difficulty and the insistent Bolero of Ravel drew it all together.

One of the greatest classic films; saw it several times in the eighties on VHS video with an English soundtrack. It appears there is no DVD version available with an English soundtrack which seems strange and annoying as I would like to have a copy to keep. Along with Gone With The Wind and Dr Zhivago it is one of the best of its type. A complicated entwined WWII story or stories of various people brought together for a single purpose, a Unicef concert in Paris that may take a couple of viewings to piece it together but well worth it. The ballet performance to Bolero at the end is spine tingling,and from someone who does not really like ballet.....

A great movie with excellent music!I liked how the characters speak their language, so the movie has English, French, German, Russian dialogues.Also, after watching it really carefully for the third time, I have determined that there are only two cases where mother&daughter or father&son are NOT played by the same actor/actress (as adults). With the story going through 3 generations with lots of characters, this can get pretty confusing.I recommend watching it several times. I saw something new every time so far.

This effort of the French cinema-world to look beyond its own borders has been quite succesful in that the story covers three continents and breathes different cultures and different times, using very different musical genres. Though some storylines end in nothing (in a typically French way), there are enough plots to build up to a climax which Ravel could not have surpassed. In the final scene some people sit together and make music music together and only we know how closely related they are. The eyes (and arms!) of the conductor of a German army-band on Place de l' Etoile when two Parisian hookers smile at him, is unforgettable.