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BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

mononkmike ...they took my friend away. A 16 years old high school kid whose sole mistake was going to a political rally mainly to see a performing artist. The weeks he spent in detention changed him forever. This film is a necessary testament so nobody forgets these dark times in Quebec's history.

gizmomogwai Les Ordres: made in the infancy of Canadian cinema, as far as feature films go. Canada's official submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for 1974, and not nominated. It's easy to see why, and indeed, I imagine a country putting this up against the cinema of the entire non-English speaking world would have raised a few eyebrows in the Academy. Okay, so you have a historically significant event (at least significant to Canada). But that's all you have. The direction has all the creativity, imagination and style of a TV movie. That's all it looks like, it never rises above that level for the entirety of the film. The sole "innovation" you have is interviewing the actors about the characters in the film itself- but that's a stunt just ripped off from Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna (1969). I didn't particularly care for it there, either, but at least Max von Sydow had something to say. None of these television actors know what they're doing here, except to say "My name is X, and I play Y..." It would have been more accurate to say "I'm nobody, and the 'character' I play is barely a character at all."It's not enough to have a human rights violation as a subject matter (and as far as world history goes, a few days in prison is small potatoes). You have to have to *do* something with it to have a film.I can see why this would have made the Toronto International Film Festival's Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time when that list was first assembled in 1984. There were a lot less good films to choose from then, and Les Ordres having inexplicably won Best Director at Cannes in 1974, I might have felt obligated to write the film in, too, for its strictly historic interest. Whether it deserved to stay on the Top 10 in the 1993 update is more debatable. Why it didn't fall off in 2004 is puzzling. The fact that it's still wasting space on the list in 2015 is laughable, especially when far worthier films like Les Bons Debarras fell off and Incendies and Mommy didn't make it at all. If this, and Mon oncle Antoine, were really the best we could do as a country, that's not inspiring- that's embarrassing.

jwer79 One of the great engaged movie of the seventies. This a real drama with its atmosphere from such a Kafka. The filming is very simple and precise. The actors are convincing and sincere. This particular way of sharing movie and documentary is very interesting and powerful. Michel Brault gave us once a cinema lesson in the University of Québec in Montréal. He told us to direct movie with the stomach, not only with the head. So I realized that even a great director like him could create through emotions more than spirit. So feel the movie and you'll discover soon enough what you understood through the movie. For every person who loved this movie, I recommend "Punishment Park" directed the same year by an English guy in USA, Peter Watkins. You can find this rare movie on IMDb.

Board This movie lasted 109 min. and already around 5 min. into it I was bored!! I really sat through 109 min. of just wanting something to happen, but nothing did. Maybe this movie is good for people interested in the event that took place in 1970, but as I knew nothing about it, it didn't appeal to me. I had hoped that a good ending would come in and save the movie, but I was let down there as well! I have seen loads of movies and have voted for over 370 movies here at IMDb, some of my favorites being "Schindler's list", "Limelight", "Breaking the waves", "Awakenings", "Fried green tomatoes", "The green mile", "Legends of the fall", "Saving private Ryan", etc., so it's not that I don't like this type of film (drama), on the contrary. I've started viewing more and more drama instead of just lame Hollywood blockbuster action flicks, but this movie was extremely boring and slow. It wasn't terrible, but REALLY bad! No more than 2 out of 10 from me!