Joyeux Noel | Full Movie | Movies Anywhere

It's a film with great humanism and if it's a little light on true drama or even realism it's intentions are honourable.

Except for a few missteps, the movie is so beautifully and sensitively rendered in its particulars, in its characterizations of soldiers and officers, and in its dramatization of a nearly miraculous event, that the result is an affecting piece of cinema.

The horror of the war, and the startling dignity of these mud-spattered soldiers, will doubtless thaw stony hearts. But the drama is as conventional as a ham sandwich.

Without an interesting point of view attached but tons of nobility to go around, it's not hard to be left with the feeling these soldiers stopped shooting at each other because, well, "Silent Night" is such an excellent song.

Christian Carion's account of the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 is sentimentalized, but smooth, with the elegant restraint typical of the most romantic French films.