Review by gcarpiceci

Les Miserables is a very well crafted movie, with excellent photography and acting, able to keep the narrative tension at good levels all along the story, with a very dramatic ending. The reason why I left the theatre with somewhat mixed feelings is that, if the movie had the ambition to elevate itself above the pure police procedural and to offer a point of view on an extremely delicate theme like the inflammatory social, racial and religious tensions of the Paris banlieue, well on this level the movie does not deliver. Les Miserables shows more than interprets, it engages the spectator without going under the surface of the issue. The post credit quote from Victo Hugo ("Remember this, my friends: there are not bad grass or bad men, just bad growers") just reinforced my doubts, as the movie focussed on the bad grass and not at all on the issue of "bad growers".