Rating: 
Summary: Peerless Dramatic Performance
Review: During the nazi occupation of Paris, when missing the last metro meant a long and dangerous night on the streets, everyone must play a part. There are great sub-plots related to freedom and tyranny, but the star is Deneuve. This is her best role, and she has had many great ones. Here, she is an actress who cannot betray her love for the leading man, Depardieu, to her playwright husband in hiding who "directs" by what he hears. Great dramatic tension, great performances, and a great illustration (or a parable) of the realities that are created by drama. Maltin is obtuse when he says the movie, especially the finale, is pointless. The end is entirely fitting and pleasant, although startling. The war is won, the subterfuge can be abandoned, and the protagonists in the drama continue to create and order reality.
Rating:
Summary: Truffault can be a lot of fun
Review: Francois Truffault, who has always terrified me as a true "art" director, comes across in this film with warmth and humor; not only that, one get to learn a little about Paris under the Nazis and how people "coped." Catherine Deneuve, wife of the director and lead lady, is gorgeous as she balances the needs of her cranky Jewish husband in hiding (Heinz Bennent; he's continuing to direct by listening in to rehearsals through the pipes) and those of her handsome leading man (Gerard Depardieu), whose only way of coming on seems to be to grasp a pretty woman by the hand, gaze into it and murmur, "I seem to see two women here." For a movie about a sad and terrible time, there is a lot of strength, here, and I found Truffault, for some bizarre reason, easy to understand.
Rating:
Summary: Truffaut at his best
Review: I was first drawn to this film when I read a news article that this film had been considered by many French critics to be the best French film of the 80's. I couldn't have agreed more with that judgment when I saw it. Truffaut goes beyond telling a story of love and tragedy in Nazi-occupied France, it shows how intensely he feels about art and theater and how inseparable they are from human life. Theater is a big part in the lives of the central characters and hence a key ingredient of this film as well. Truffaut uses that fictional theater and interweaves that with real lives so seamlessly that it sometimes blows your mind away. I think in many ways it is an extension of 'Day for Night'. A terrific achievement, to say the least.
Rating:
Summary: Grace and Elegance
Review: If films were planes, Francois Truffaut's "The Last Metro" would be a glider, cutting gently through the winds of occupied Paris, and moving gracefully through the lives of a theatrical troup attempting to mount a production during wartime. As Marion Steiner, Catherine Deneuve brings elegance and beauty to the subtle intrigue and fluctuating emotions of day-to-day life under Nazi occupation in 1942. Like Truffaut's film, her performance is one of nuance and subtlety, and garnered her the award for best actress in France. Marion Steiner leads two lives, separated only by a stairway. Below the theatre, in the cellar, she shares a love with her husband Lucas (Heinz Bennet), a Jewish theatrical director who must live in hiding, coming to life only when Marion's footsteps bring her into his claustrophobic world. Their love is real, but is slowly threatened by the distance and contrast of the living going on up above and the stagnation and frustration below. The internal strain becomes greater when Marion falls under the spell of her leading man, Gerard Depardieu, Truffaut's camera capturing the fleeting glances and icy demeanor that is our window into Marion's heart. Depardieu's passion for French resistance, however, may prove greater than his passion for the theatre, and Marion must also contend with a pro-Nazi theatre critic who could sink the production before it begins. Only after Truffaut has used his camera to show us this elegantly detailed world of the French theatre during wartime does his screenplay suprise us, and remind us in an uplifting way that life itself is but a play, and we are all part of the cast. This is definitely a masterpiece, but if you have not ventured into foreign films yet, I would not suggest this be your maiden voyage. One must ride the 747 first to appreciate the grace of Truffaut's glider, turning ever so quietly, without a sound, into the winds of the human heart.
Rating:
Summary: A true classic
Review: One of Truffaut's and Deneuve's best pictures. It has warmth, history, a sense of the absurd, excellent pacing, and a bit of suspense. It's also has more a linear storyline then many French films. All of the performances are excellent.
Two Warnings:
1. Avoid dubbed versions (Deneuve's sense of humor is in her voice, not on her face, resulting in a mirthless character when dubbed).
2. The new Fox version changed the sub-titles and wrecked some of the best lines.
Rating: 
Summary: A Satisying Movie of Choices and Adult Feelings
Review: This is a first-class romantic, suspensful and humane movie. The Germans have occupied Paris and there are informers everywhere. Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), a famous actress, has taken over the management of the theater her husband, Lucas Steiner, an equally famous director, has left. Steiner is a Jew and disappeared shortly after the Germans took over. For the next production Marion Steiner hires a young actor, Bernard Granger (Gerard Depardieu), who loves women and who gradually comes to love Marion.
There are secrets everywhere. Lucas Steiner is hiding and living in the basement of the theater, protected by his wife. He directs the new play through notes to his wife and discussions in the late evening when she visits him. Granger is an member of the resistance who could bring disaster to the theater if he is caught. Marion Steiner is devoted to her husband, but feelings for Granger slowly begin to appear, and are not unnoticed by her husband. All the while life in Paris under the Nazis goes on, the play is prepared and rehearsed, Jewish members of the company are protected or caught or flee. An odious, collaborating journalist and theater reviewer uses his contacts and influence to try to arrange a relationship with Marion. Eventually Bernard leaves the theater for active fighting.
This is something of a romantic movie of choices. At the end of the movie, the Germans are fleeing Paris. Bernard has returned and a new play starring Marion and Bernard is a great success. Lucas is spotted by the audience at the rear of a box and they stand to applaud him. Bernard and Marion bring him to the stage to join them in receiving the ovation for the play. Then Marion moves between the two men, holds their hands, and the three of them stand smiling while the applause roars on. And that's the end. This is, in my view, a very satisfying movie of theater life, of the occupation, and of three people who manage to find their way.
I think the DVD looks great, with many of the scenes having a dark, warm look about them.
Rating:
Summary: Exquisite
Review: This is one of Truffaut's best films and I highly reccommend it
Rating:
Summary: Late Truffaut that gets better with every viewing.
Review: Truffaut follows in the tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville by adapting a popular genre as a serious allegory for the darkest period in French history: the Nazi Occupation. Just as Melville used the gangster film to examine notions of legality, legitimacy, authority and criminality in a period when the Resistance were outlaws and the police were rounding up Jews for the death camps, so Truffaut takes the beloved putting-on-a-show warhorse, and uses it as a metaphor for the conditions of life in Occupied France: the need to act, adapt and continually discard roles. When Depardieu's character leaves to fight for the Resistance, he puns about exchanging his make-up (maquillage) for the maquis. What Truffaut is most interested in, as in all his films, is the effect this need for constant dissembling has on individual identity and relationships. This wonderful romantic comedy plays like a mature update of 'Casablanca', richly stylised, bravely open-ended, with Truffaut's moving camera wrenching spirit from claustrophobic confines.
Rating:
Summary: Late Truffaut that gets better with every viewing.
Review: Truffaut follows in the tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville by adapting a popular genre as a serious allegory for the darkest period in French history: the Nazi Occupation. Just as Melville used the gangster film to examine notions of legality, legitimacy, authority and criminality in a period when the Resistance were outlaws and the police were rounding up Jews for the death camps, so Truffaut takes the beloved putting-on-a-show warhorse, and uses it as a metaphor for the conditions of life in Occupied France: the need to act, adapt and continually discard roles. When Depardieu's character leaves to fight for the Resistance, he puns about exchanging his make-up (maquillage) for the maquis. What Truffaut is most interested in, as in all his films, is the effect this need for constant dissembling has on individual identity and relationships. This wonderful romantic comedy plays like a mature update of 'Casablanca', richly stylised, bravely open-ended, with Truffaut's moving camera wrenching spirit from claustrophobic confines.
Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT
Review: TRUFFAUT, DENEUVE & DEPARDIEU AT THEIR BEST... BREATHTAKING STORY , PERFECT SET, PERFECT COSTUME, ONE OF THE BEST FRENCH MOVIE EVER...
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