Popular reviews

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  Review by phoebe 💫 ★★★★ 2

  Obviously, like every French movie from this period, its feminism is just so flawed, but there was one scene where two guys are talking and one says, "Women! They wear lipstick and bras and little short skirts just to tempt us!" and the other one says, "Maybe so, but one time I put on a pair of my sister's silk panties and they felt so good, no wonder they do it" and for that brief, glimmering moment, I saw the end of sexism

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  Review by Michael Casey ★★★★½ 1

  It starts with a man running down the street. There is an awful lot of running in Truffaut films, maybe a marathon’s worth, I never counted, but I would be willing to bet that no other director made his actors run as much as Truffaut did. Why? Because it looks good on camera, adds urgency to a scene, provides kinetic energy, and makes the characters active instead of passive, in essence, running is cinematic. The 400 Blows concludes with Antoine Doinel’s long run to the shore, a mere seventeen months later, Albert Rémy (the actor who played Doinel’s father) came running into Shoot The Piano Player and writer/director François Truffaut was back.

  Truffaut’s debut feature, The 400 Blows, was more…

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  Review by Carlos Valladares ★★★★★

  A near-perfect synthesis of style and narrative. Charles Aznavour's Charlie is too real for me; the levels on which I connect with him are scary. A ripping investigation on the filmic representation of females: along with Varda's Le Bonheur, it reveals and subverts cinema's latent bias for "masculine" pictures and male-oriented, machoistic storylines. A sensitive romantic male in tune with his shyness and who respects women: how is this just barely a novel concept in 1960? (Sometimes, you get the feeling some guys think it's a novel concept today.) The final shot is as heartbreaking and memorable as the comedown from a first love.

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  Review by coffee ★★★★½ 1

  every french new wave romance is the prettiest woman to ever be on screen and the most rat faced man to have ever been born. great movie

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  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★★

  Who is Charlie Koller?
  All we know is...he’s the piano man

  I had a great time with this movie. There’s so many fantastic ideas floating around as Truffaut delivers a bumper crop of technique, style and experimentation that makes it a blast to watch. The moment the film was over I immediately wanted to watch it again so I could absorb even more of those wonderful ideas.

  BONUS POINTS for that meta moment when Charlie covers Clarisse with a sheet and says,

  “This is how it’s done in the movies.”

  
  Cinematic Time Capsule - 1960 Ranked

  Martin Scorsese’s Favorite Films

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  Review by Deckk ★★ 5

  Stage 10: Albertville > Valence, 190.7 km (flat)
  Winner: Mark Cavendish (Deceuninck - Quick Step)
  Yellow Jersey: Tadej Pogačar (UAE-Team Emirates)
  Verdict: Another sprint stage, another Cavendish win. 33 total now, one more win away from sharing the record of Merckx, two from having the record all for himself. I'm praying for it!

  100-word review: Charlie is a shy, washed-up classical pianist who began to play jazz tunes in a dive bar after his wife's suicide. He and Lena — the bar's waitress Charlie is dating — get dragged into all kinds of trouble when he helps his brother escape a pair of gangsters. François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player is a 'trenchcoat' French New Wave picture that's too French and too…

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  Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★★ 2

  For me, it is hard to separate this film from the Truffaut to come.

  This is an impressive work in its own right - though with some issues vis-à-vis the presentation of women - it just feels off by comparison. Though, a lot of the expression of the film feels like Truffaut: an improvisational messiness and a solid undercurrent of pathos and humanism.

  The actual narrative of the film feels more in line with the work of Godard and Melville, some of the direction of it feeling like a looser Melville. This is a shame when the sharpness of Melville is his key joy and what makes his crime films so stylish. The narrative here is not as fitting to…

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  Review by benhack ★★★★

  The burden of a false persona, manufacturing a reticent guise only to become swallowed back into the maelstrom of animosity and pathos in what seems like a perpetual loop. Love is sensational, allowing character to manifest in a sentient honesty, yet perhaps such a notion can only bring back a malaise for piano playing virtuoso Charlie. It's his ambivalence that diminishes his ambiguity, the blood on his palms profuse as a texture verbatim of the blood that surges through his heart in love's success. He loves her, a vehemence never felt prior, lingering and true. A melancholy, a crash of zealous keys upon a demanding instrument and the accord of frequent pistol fire. The perfect aesthetic for another fatal tragedy.…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★ 31

  I am the furthest possible thing from a François Truffaut scholar, but in my very limited exposure to his non-400 Blows work (just this and The Soft Skin so far, both either written or c0-written by Truffaut himself), it's hard to shake the impression that he sees women less as human beings than as objects to move around in service of men and/or their storylines.

  It's fascinating to read that Truffaut decided with Shoot the Piano Player to make the man "weak" and the women "strong," because it's an intention which reveals that, to him, a strong woman is one who devotes herself to man, whether it's his career (Thérèse), his imagined future (both Thérèse and Léna), or his ease…

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  Review by Josh Gillam ★★½ 2

  Francois Truffaut’s second film is a crime drama starring Charles Aznavour as a pianist in a small Parisian bar who becomes drawn into danger when his brother reappears, on the run from two gangsters.

  Truffaut makes the film feel distinctive, using New Wave features like flashbacks, narration and handheld cameras in order give it a feeling of spontaneity and freshness. There’s a playfulness to the way the story is told, Truffaut demonstrating his love of film noir in the way he both uses and subverts typical tropes.

  Aznavour is superb in the lead role, showing a man who has retreated into himself after a personal tragedy, slowly being driven down the path he thought he had escaped from, making his…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

  Charles Aznavour is genuinely marvellous as Charlie Kohler in this French New Wave crime drama which indicates another side of François Truffaut’s artistic personality after his authoritative classic The 400 Blows.

  Based on the 1956 hardboiled crime novel Down There by David Goodis, it follows Kohler, a former concert pianist who has traded in his prestige and now finds himself in the existing circumstances of playing in a dilapidated Parisian cafe. He is soon being approached by his brother Chico (Albert Rémy) who has ventured into some complications with two gangsters and realises that he requires some assistance. 

  Truffaut creates a medley of satire and uncertainty together with an assortment of technical filmmaking techniques into an extraordinary tale. It's delightfully…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 1

  “Shoot the Piano Player” is a melancholy piece of noir that whistles an upbeat tune while breaking your heart. 

  Truffaut‘s experimentalism falls into occasional messiness as “Player” veers through improvised street scenes. But messiness from Truffaut is still better than the best efforts of most other directors.

  The freeness of the film lets it burst away from the usual noir tropes of stagey scenes constrained in dark offices or alleys. There’s no lack of darkness, but it instead spills out into lively bar halls or fresh snow. A clash of sun and shadow, narrative and abstraction, commercialism and art.