The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Based on the 1950 book of the same name by W. Stanley Moss, this is quite an entertaining war adventure film but it could have been a great deal better. It tells the story of the kidnapping of General Heinrich Kriepe, the commander of the German occupation force on Crete, by Moss, his Special Operations Executive (SOE) colleague Major Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Cretan resistance in April 1944. However, it approaches the material with a light touch, incorporating quite a bit of humour and often seeming like a "Boy's Own" adventure. I don't have any problem with this approach but it is not executed as well as I would have liked. The film was released under the rather more obvious title "Night Ambush" in the United States.The script by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is fairly good but there are a few structural problems. It was a mistake for the kidnapping to occur comparatively early in the film as the planning stages could have been much more interesting and it sometimes feels as if it has nowhere to go after that. The depiction of the kidnapping itself was apparently accurate but it was not depicted in a very exciting manner. After that, there is not much of a sense of suspense or tension as the two British officers and the Cretans evade the Nazi patrols comparatively easily. However, I did like the fact that there was a sense of mutual respect and admiration between the British and German forces, something which Powell and Pressburger explored in more depth in "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp". While the writing is not up to their usual high standard, the duo's direction is as deft as ever. The film looks beautiful and it makes great use of the beautiful scenery of the south of France. Unfortunately, this was the final film that they made together under their production company, the Archers, but they later collaborated on "They're a Weird Mob" in 1966 and "The Boy Who Turned Yellow" in 1972.The film stars Dirk Bogarde in a characteristically excellent performance as Leigh Fermor, a colourful gentleman adventurer and scholar soldier of the old mould. Known as "Philedem" to the Greeks, he played a major role in helping to organise the Cretan resistance during the war. Bogarde brings all of the considerable charm and charisma at his disposal but Leigh Fermor was seemingly a larger than life figure and there are, at best, only a few hints of that in the script. Powell and Pressburger regular Marius Goring is very good as the honourable General Kriepe but I would have still preferred if their original choice Curd Jürgens had been cast instead. That said, Bogarde and Goring have good chemistry. Plus, their slight resemblance makes it easier to buy that Leigh Farmer could be mistaken for Kriepe in the dark than it would have been if the far larger Jürgens had been cast. David Oxley, probably best known for playing the small role of Sir Hugo Baskerville in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1959), is fairly dull and forgettable as Moss. In contrast to Bogarde, he is mostly charisma free. Cyril Cusack is great as Captain Sandy Rendel, who was not washed for six months and has the pungent smell to prove it. Wolfe Morris, Michael Gough and Laurence Payne are very good as Leigh Farmer and Moss' Cretan allies George, Manoli and Andoni Zoidakis respectively, even though Gough's Greek accent is practically non-existent. The film also features nice small appearances from former SOE operative Christopher Lee and Richard Marner (both of whom got to make use of their fluent German), George Pravda and an uncredited David McCallum in his film debut.Overall, this is a fun film belonging to the "men on a mission" World War II subgenre but I would have liked it if the Archers had bowed out on a stronger film.

even allowing for the fact that Ican take or leave Powell and Pressburger either as a team or working individually this is still pretty ho hum. It's not just that it's yet another true-life adventure torn from the annals of World War II - and boy, were they glad to get rid of it - it's more that it's exciting or engrossing enough to stand out from the others; it's not even that apart from Bogard and a badly miscast Cyril Cusack the only British actors involved are definitely minor league in the shape of Michael Gough and Wolf Morris, it's more that no two actors - and that includes Marius Goring - are able to give the impression that they are in the same film or often in the same scene. All in all it's something of an unintentional Greek tragedy.

Yes , it does come from A Midsummer Night's Dream.This is because when the operation occurred, the British operators went under the codenames of Oberon, Titania and Ariel for the radio traffic back to Cairo. See Xan Fielding's memoirs as well as Lawrence Durrell's recollections of Paddy Leigh Fermor in Bitter Lemons, his reminiscences of the British campaign against EOKA in Cyprus in the late 50s.It's not that bad a movie as it absolutely avoids the mawkishness of a propaganda piece and has a semi-documentary feel to it. You must remember there was an entire SS division on the island against which the 5 Britons and about 800 partisans were ranged. It is not so much derring-do as in the vein of The Password is Courage, another excellent true - life drama of Bogarde's.

Think of `The Guns of Navarone', but with these differences:(1) The band of adventurers genuinely like each other.(2) Their mission is not to blow anything up. Rather, they plan to kidnap a German general and take him to Cairo. It's a publicity stunt. But it soon ceases to be a MERE publicity stunt: demonstrating German vulnerability may be as important as creating it.(3) We get a good look at Crete - and NOT just because of spectacular scenic photography. We really feel at home on Cretan soil. Michael Powell, who had a talent for finding out-of-the-way composers (he also introduced Ralph Vaughan Williams and Brian Easdale to the cinema) has this time found Mikis Theodorakis, whose score is strongly flavoured but friendly to the ear.With all this, `Ill Met by Moonlight' is an unusual venture by Powell and Pressburger, in that it isn't unusual: it's another World War II mission story, and there have been dozens. It IS more civilised than most. It tells its simple story neatly and cleanly; it's sweet, unpretentious, and disappointing only in that, since it was Powell and Pressburger's last official collaboration, it would have been nice to go out with a bigger bang.The title is a line from `A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Its relevance is not obvious, at any rate not to me. Am I missing something?