A Bag of Marbles (2017) poster
2017 · war · drama · supernatural

A Bag of Marbles

Directed by Christian Duguay1h 53m2017
ElsewhereIMDb7.37kRT83%Metacritic55
  • sombre
  • brisk
  • intense
Movie DNA

Sombre, kinetic, measured war / drama, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, mid-stakes, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

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At the beginning of the 1940s, in a France occupied by Nazi forces, lived the Jewish Joffo family. Happy and tight-knit, she sees her future darken when all members of the family are forced to wear the yellow star. Fearing the worst, the parents organized their family to flee to the free zone in the south of the country. Maurice, twelve years old, and Joseph, ten years old, will therefore leave alone in order to maximize their chances of finding their older brothers already settled in Nice. The brothers left to their own devices demonstrate an incredible amount of cleverness, courage, and ingenuity to escape the enemy invasion and to try to reunite their family once again.

Our read · A Bag of Marbles (2017) reads as a sombre, kinetic, grounded war · drama · supernatural entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of A Bag of Marbles

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What watching it is actually like.

You want two Jewish boys improvising survival through occupied France.

ends warmit stays with yousteady all the waygrips by minute 10attention 4/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upchild perilgraphic violence

Skip it tonightSkip if Holocaust peril with children onscreen will sit too heavy.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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