Critics reviews

Without being sentimental, the drama is incredibly moving as the muted light plays over young faces that are about to face the unknowable evils of the adult world.

It's a harsh world, dictated by wartime exigencies. But here, somewhat uncharacteristically, Malle allows himself no directorial flourish nor digression. Au Revoir les Enfants is a bold rites-of-passage story of initiation into a world of moral uncertainty that is chastely free of exaggeration, histrionics and bombast.

It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes...

[T]old without an ounce of sentimentality. Malle builds Au Revoir Les Enfants out of small but vivid details...

Crisply photographed and directed with understated grace, the film can feel a little standoffish given the emotive subject matter. But with strong performances from the young leads and a vice-like air of mounting tension, it’s well worth revisiting.

Remarkably, neither of the two lead boys had acted before, and have hardly acted again since, but their wholly natural and beautifully shot friendship is spellbinding. Having been haunted by the story throughout his life, Malle accomplishes a searing depiction of dawning maturity and understanding.

Malle’s heart-breaking vision of his past, even when rendered through decades of reflection, is still devastatingly incomplete, seething with a trauma that will never be fully quelled.

Au Revoir Les Enfants is solidly bourgeois, excusing the misbehavior of the moneyed classes by charting how the pervasiveness of evil makes us all complicit.

Louis Malle, possibly at his best here. The drama is subtle but affecting.

Is the film only about guilt? Not at all. It is constructed very subtly...

By many other directors' standards, "Au Revoir" would be a major achievement. But Malle has reached higher. If he'd made his childhood movie earlier in his career - when he didn't have the sense to be so dispassionate - it might have packed a meatier punch. Now it's just a deftly aimed poke.

Malle has written and directed with the compassion of an adult and the simplicity of a child, setting the pranks of seventh-graders against the prejudices of adults, juxtaposing grade-school bullies with a Gestapo goon... But Malle never oversimplifies...