Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Micransix Crappy film

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Cissy Évelyne It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

domdel39 There's some of Hitchcock, Tati and Tarkovsky in this expertly directed slow burn of a film. Following the passengers on a train that travels through the Polish night, "Night Train" is a study in people watching. Featuring a cast of a dozen or so, "Night Train" works best when it does very little. Suspense films always benefit from revealing their information in a very drip-drip manner. Some do it better than others. The makers of "Night Train" may be accused of keeping things vague for a little too long. Fair point. I felt like that at some points during its' running time. However, when the final image flickered from the screen, I was left, not with a sense that I had been cheated, but with a sense that I had been witness to a very unique film experience. If anything, "Night Train" is part suspense film and part fake doc as it pays close attention to a number of brief, dramatically quiet, yet enjoyable moments shared between various passengers. Though focused primarily on 2 characters, "Night Train" features a number of background players - who line the corridors of the travelling train - chatting, flirting, philosophizing with each other. These secondary characters are all very memorable and interesting for one reason or another and, in an astonishing scene late in the film, they share a very powerful moment that takes them from euphoria to something approaching mild disgust. In the end, "Night Train" is less concerned with satisfying the requirements of a genre demanding twist after twist and more interested in observing humanity in all its' flawed glory.This film stays with you. I'm glad I watched it.

blanche-2 As a viewer, for me, the most important thing about a film is to know what it is I'm about to see.Up front, one has to know ahead of time that "Night Train" is a psychological drama, not a Hitchcock suspense story, not a murder mystery. Setting it up by using the name Hitchcock is going to cause people to hate it.Night Train is filmed in a dark, moody. claustrophobic way, and looks similar to Diabolique. It concerns the passengers of an overcrowded train en route to the seaside. One of the people on this train is a murderer. The train is filled with interesting characters: a beautiful blonde, Marta (Lucyna Winnicka) in the wrong compartment, who refuses to leave; the man in sunglasses, Jerszy (Leon Niemczyk) who is in the same compartment; an insomniac who can't sleep in a bunk bed because it reminds him of his time in a concentration camp; an attorney practicing a closing to a jury; his good-looking, flirtatious wife; a young man rejected by Marta, who continues to pursue her, even at one point hanging off her window on the train.When police board the train unexpectedly, they are looking for the murderer and an assumption is made. And here the story becomes about crowd psychology, and there's a neat twist.Night Train moves slowly and concentrates on the characters and their interrelationships. The "story" part actually comes in the last half hour. The final scene in the film is very striking.Some excellent acting throughout, and as a bit of trivia, the lead actress, Lucyna Winnicka, married the director, Jerzy Kawalerowicz.Recommended for its atmosphere, jazz score, and style.

robert-temple-1 It is marvellous that this magnificent Polish classic has been made available in 2011 in a restored version on DVD with English subtitles. The film, in crisp black and white with extremely creative camera work, is a joy to watch. In many ways it resembles the Western noir films of the late forties and early fifties, but it has psychological depth and is not just a thriller. In many ways it reminds me of a high-quality noir such as Nicholas Ray's IN A LONELY PLACE (1950, see my review), where loneliness and tragic encounters are really the main theme. That film's theme was 'I loved you for a few weeks', but in this film the love lasts for but a day. NIGHT TRAIN (POCIAG in Polish, which merely means 'train', though in an earlier release for the cinema, the film was known in English as BALTIC EXPRESS) takes place mostly on a train, and train films are always such a great favourite, being a perfect metaphor of life. This aspect is intensively stressed by the director, with his shots of the many separate carriages and compartments, both full and later empty. The moving shots up and down the crowded corridors seem to be a miracle of planning, and give every appearance of having been shot on a real moving train. But some of it was done in a studio with removable walls, to enable this seemingly impossible camera movement to take place. The camera never stops, it roams restlessly like a wild beast through this moving Noah's ark of humanity, seething as it is with mystery, fear, an escaping murderer, a woman with murder in her heart, a despairing wife trapped in a hopeless marriage, and even a survivor of Buchenwald who cannot sleep in a bunk because it reminds him of the concentration camp, so that he spends all his time in the corridor reading, until he drops off. They are all supposed to be going off on holiday to the seaside, a town called Hel. The dramas meanwhile are swirling round everyone as they tensely smoke their cigarettes and fret about the dangers of a killer in their midst, and make furtive assignations. The train stops at night at a place where it has never stopped before, and three policemen get on, in search of the man who has just murdered his wife. Which of the mysterious men on the train is really the murderer? The astonishing scene where the murderer leaps from the moving train and all the men go after him in a mob scene and trap him in a ramshackle cemetery is meant to be a metaphor for the seamy side of Poland's recent history. The Polish government had banned jazz music until the reforms of 1956, so this film has a defiantly jazz soundtrack all the way throughout, though soft, dreamy, and haunting. The atmosphere of the film is electric but also mesmerizing. There are long periods of brooding and contemplation, and many characters barely speak, while others chatter uncontrollably. The focus of the film is on the mysterious blonde beauty, played by Lucyna Winnicka, who says little, and after this film was shot, married the director. She conveys so much by her eyes and expressions and moods that there is little need for dialogue. The film was directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz (1922-2007), who made 17 films between 1952 and 2001, of which this, PHARAOH (1966), QUO VADIS? (2001), and MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS (1961) are the most famous. In NIGHT TRAIN, he shows himself to be a master of the cinematic craft. The film is continuously absorbing, thoughtful but paced, and deeply intriguing. Like life, it does not answer all of its mysteries, and happiness remains elusive. One of the most frustrated and disappointed of the characters is played by the famous actor, Zybigniew Cybulski, as an eager young man who simply cannot comprehend his rejection by Winnicka, or even begin to understand her new and impenetrable air of gloom and inevitable fate. When fate takes an unexpected turn, the defeat of inevitability itself has the taste of exchanging one emptiness for another. Empty compartments, empty lives; a speeding train, life's hurtling express in which we all are carried. This is one of the finest of the many 'train films'.

adipocea This is a film which is a privilege to watch, I don't understand why Criterion collection doesn't have this issued yet. If you didn't watch it make yourself one of the biggest favors and watch it right away. I won't describe the movie, I won't spoil your pleasure. This is not a great movie in the sense that other great movies from the same period are considered masterpieces by critics but when we come to watch them they impress us very little. This is a treat, a delight, a thrill, by any modern standards, you have just to find some good subtitles not the lousy ones available on the web and translated online word by word by translation websites. I myself have watched the movie with this kind of subtitles and still I managed to be impressed to tears by this gem. A big bravo to Jerzy Kawalerowicz!