'Grand Illusion' is polished up for 75th anniversary ✭✭✭✭

Opening Friday for a week's run at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Jean Renoir's"Grand Illusion" marches in the opposite direction of grand set pieces or visual flamboyance. Its moments of poetry are many but (properly) fleeting, like the shot of the German farm girl sitting alone at a cottage dining table where members of her family, casualties of the Great War, used to eat and talk and plan the day. There may be nobility in the way we live and die in battle, and between battles, but in the end, someone is left alone.

Michael Phillips

June 29, 2012