Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

jdonalds-5 I don't often dole out 10 stars for movies. I reserve that for nothing but the best, and this is one of them.I have a little bit of bias first because I am a student of WWII, and second because I lived in Paris France for three years. This was a powerful story well told. I found it completely plausible, having good dialog, great acting, wonderful cinematography, and with a story line that held up solidly throughout the entire movie.There are some rough parts, that is some parts are difficult to observe, but those were in context without being egregious. My French isn't good enough for me to follow without reading the subtitles. I'm sorry because I was not able to give 100% of my attention to the wonderful visuals.I did look this story up enough to learn that it was based on a true story. I don't know how much of this was totally true but it didn't matter because it was so well told.Congratulations to the director Jean-Paul Salomé.I may actually purchase the DVD.

trangia55 I enjoy movies like this where the characters are speaking their own language. For example i really like the German language version of Das Boot. However the historical blunders spoiled the movie for me. If the Geologist had been in possession of such detailed information of the mulberry harbour units he would have been "BIGOT" listed and would never have been allowed out of England to make the survey. Then the use of a C47 for dropping agents was not done. It would have been a Lancaster or other bomber converted to drop agents. The date of the mission means that invasion stripes would not have been on any aircraft. the order to paint invasion stripes did not go out until June 3rd. Apart from one squadron of Mustangs. If a silenced pistol had been needed a single shot Welrod would have been used not the automatic one that the character used in the movie. overall a good shoot em up for a rainy afternoon but spoiled by the inaccuracies.

johnnyboyz At the time of Female Agent's production, and as a sentiment that has in all fairness hung around through to around about the present, the French were/are probably making the best films of any nation collectively in the world. With this in mind, we do enjoy a good French film; even more so if it's driven by women, because that can be good fun and since a good Second World War film makes for a fair old crack now and again, what's the problem with sitting down for a cut-and-thrust, causality driven World War 2 resistance picture about varying parties darting across occupied Europe? Female Agents ticks all of the above boxes; a pacey, highly enjoyable little yarn which tells a good story in an unabashed fashion whilst shedding light on the tales of those history has, to a fair old few, since forgotten: the woman out of the factory, and on the front-line of war.The film begins with a Bond-inspired pre-credits action sequence; Sophie Marceau, she of once of a Bond role, plays Louise Desfontaines: a woman who's seemingly at the top of her warmongering game in her sniping of an array of German soldiers on a cold, bleak evening illuminated only by that of the light brought about by the crude lamps dotted around this docklands area and the harsh headlamps to that of an array of German vehicles in and around the locale. Working with a few others, and under a high pressure situation as things spiral out of control inducing a gun fight, she manages to resurrect the situation and escape with her life amidst an unholy mess that should have been a mission executed more smoothly. It's 1944, and our Louise is placed at the forefront of a larger, more important mission that she will lead in the field, for which she will require the recruitment of certain others. The crew are a motley, disparate lot; a faction of women of varying ages, backgrounds and views on what constitutes a way of life together for this mission based in northern France. These include the likes of Maria (Sansa), a nurse; Suzy (Gillain), a woman formerly a stage strip tease performer; an explosives expert in Gaëlle (François) and that of Jeanne (Depardieu), who's dragged from prison and is there in the first place on some serious sanctions - she's killed, and she'll be asked to kill again.Once they are rounded up and taken to a British airfield additionally populated by that of the men of the American Air Force, a scene that will no doubt go down like a lead balloon stateside plays out in which a bomber crew make light of the women by wolf whistling as they strut past. Yes, it's in good fun but it is first and foremost director Jean-Paul Salomé highlighting the threat of both objectification and transgression these women face in a film of this nature; here addressing it and, by making us aware of such an item, steadily deviating from what would otherwise be an ill-minded approach to dealing with these women driving a film that will come to be rich in action and the process of placing these women and their bodies on the front-line of warfare. The women have a foil, a Nazi colonel whom is ahead of the game; a man whom manages to make frighteningly accurate predictions on where the imminent Normandy landings will take place. It is in fact a proposal put to an array of German higher-ups in a briefing room; a proposal which is promptly mocked by those within and therefore dismissed. The man is Karl Heindrich (Bleibtreu), and in spite of these disagreements, we sense is unafraid to make swift decisions and as a result of his predictions, must have a fair degree of intuition.Desfontaines and her team's mission goes well, a job in a quaint manor house occupied by the Germans adhering to the Where Eagles Dare ideology of seducing and sneaking your way in but opting to shoot one's way out – blowing the odd thing up in the process not necessarily harming proceedings. Post job, the game changes; and while Salomé's film has been accused of borrowing an awful lot from various war films, The Dirty Dozen in particular, its twist after the opening act has it mostly feel like something in the region of Peckinpah's The Getaway or Frankenheimer's French-set chase thriller Ronin. There are even splashes of Infernal Affairs; the film mutating into a film detailing a Frenchmen in league with the Nazi's discovered by the girls, and consequently forced by the girls, into working with the titular agents as one of their own are simultaneously caught and tortured by the Germans into revealing secrets which could ruin everything.The things about Female Agents we enjoy most lie with its director's ability to get on with proceedings; we enjoy the notion of two distinct factions, each with enough of a force behind them, barging through most of occupied Europe desiring their prize: the general wrongfulness or evilness of the Nazi war-machine under Heindrich chasing that of the empowered women looking to get away, although hang around long enough to save a few of their own, subverting that of, and continuing the sense of this being a crime film-come-'fallout-from-a-heist' movie, Mann's male dominated Heat or De Palma's The Untouchables as a film covering characters trapped in oneupmanship. The film is sharp but tough to watch on the occasions it needs to be; thrilling and exciting, without ever exploiting the warfare as action, when it needs to be and makes for a really decent resistance movie in a recent canon of films that are as such.

robert-temple-1 This is a very exciting and effective film about female espionage agents of the British S.O.E. (Special Operations Executive) during World War II. It is ironical that it is the French, not the British, who made this film, in which only a few sentences of English are spoken. The English subtitles are really too rapid, I must point out. Apart from a few scenes set in England, the film effectively all takes place in Nazi Occupied France under the revolting Vichy Regime in 1944, where all the dangerous missions in the story take place. As the film proceeds, we realize that the underlying threat is that the secrets of the D-Day Normandy landings are in danger of being betrayed, thus destroying their surprise value and enabling the Nazis to win the War. So the stakes could not be higher. According to titles shown at the end of the film, this story is in many respects true, and the lead character played with tremendous, bitter panache by Sophie Marceau only died as recently as 2004 at the age of 98! As she was a French woman, though working as an agent for the SOE (and her brother worked for De Gaulle's Free French in London), that must explain why her story was known in France, and why it was French producers who decided to film it. The story as filmed contains countless inaccuracies of procedure and plot which could never really have happened, and some details are ridiculous (a sister and brother sent on the same mission together!?). So the story has been greatly hyped-up to 'Hollywoodize' it, by the French Hollywood, which we might perhaps call by the name of Tuileriewood-en-Seine, or Tile-Town as opposed to Tinsel-Town ('a night out on the tiles' being a good description for some Paris evenings). The film starts rather slowly, and one is not certain that it is going to work at first. But when it gets into its stride, it is gripping and coherent. There are many grisly scenes of torture by the Gestapo, which take a strong stomach, and seeing Nazis savagely and maniacally beating up women and nearly drowning them in water tanks, even pulling out their finger nails (this is done to the delicately beautiful actress Deborah Francois, who appears as fragile as the petals of a fluttering chamomile flower on a windy day), is more than merely upsetting. However, it was obviously decided by the producers that these pretty young women were to be treated with as much grit as men, both in their actions and in the depiction of their fates. It is no bad thing to remind viewers of how the Nazis behaved, and that they really did these things. There are some detailed touches which add to the horror of it all: a Gestapo woman clerk sits impassively at a small wooden table making notes, wholly unmoved by the agonized shrieks and screams of the women being tortured in front of her. As for the Nazi SS colonel supervising all of this and trying to get the information out of them, he could not be more bored and oblivious to the suffering and the screams, which to him are merely tedious. To the Nazis, torturing human beings was no different from stepping on ants. If it accomplishes nothing else, perhaps this film will make a few young people think for a moment about a War which to them is now 'long ago and far away', and why should they be interested. Just seeing a screen title informing us that the Gestapo's Paris Headquarters was in Avenue Foch is enough to precipitate a mild attack of hysteria. That is where all the billionaires now live in luxury. I have been in a couple of their grand houses, and all I can say is: 'Nom de Dieu!' And to think that it was in those surroundings, where the super-rich now besport themselves with their vintage Cristal champagne (I must admit it is delicious, but no one really needs it), that the Gestapo pulled out the finger nails of beautiful girls in their early twenties and thought nothing of it, merely finding their screams of pain a bore! Do see this film, if only to be horrified and appalled, but also to admire the courage of the women, not only the men, who gave their lives to defeat the greatest evil that befell a much-accursed earth during the 20th century, the regime of the monstrous instruments of Evil who dared to call themselves a Master Race.