Newly re-released in a sparkling digital restoration, Jean Renoir’s (La Règle du jeu) masterpiece is one of the greatest pacifist films of all time. An incisive social portrait of prisoners of war pulling together in a heroic bid for freedom, it was conceived after the slaughter and destruction of WWI, but its contemporary resonance rests on something beyond its anti-war message. Beyond the haunting star performances from Jean Gabin and Eric von Stroheim, and the alternately witty and horrific details of camp life, there’s a deep scrutiny of the human condition at work. The “grande illusion”, Renoir shows, is not just that post-war peace can be permanent, but that true brotherhood - liberty, equality and fraternity unalloyed by social differences - can only be engendered by the horrors of conflict, and will dissolve after wartime. It’s this ambiguity at the heart of the film that ensures La Grande Illusion’s continuing relevance in the pantheon of cinema. “One of the true classics of world cinema and a landmark anti-war statement” Film4.com “A masterpiece [...] the camera doesn’t move, it glides.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times “one of the most haunting of all war films [...] an oasis of subtlety, moral intelligence and deep emotion on the cinematic landscape” Janet Maslin, The New York Times

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