Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Alain Resnais was part of the so-called Left Bank of the French New Wave, alongside with Varda, Marker and Demy, who were politically much more aware compared to the film fanatics of Cahiers du Cinema (Rohmer, Truffaut, Rivette, Godard, Chabrol). Alain Resnais has always been interested in past but here he focuses on its impact with regards to the future. The War Is Over was his fourth feature, following Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year in Marienbad and Muriel, and still remains as one of the finest films of political cinema. The film builds around the theme of how to come to terms with one's past in order to live in peace with the present. No other place -- maybe Germany or Poland -- offers such a great setting for this but Spain because the shadows of the Civil War are so present. It is a milieu that has become the symbol of the war, so to speak.Diego Mora (Yves Montad) is an old man who spent his youth as a revolutionary in the Spanish Civil War. Now, thirty years later, he's part of a group that wants to redeem the dreams of the revolution in Paris. All the members of the group are living in the past, and so is Diego. But soon he has a moment of realization and breaks himself away from the chains of illusion and decides to make a change. Thus, The War Is Over is really a story about a man who is living a lie. It tells, rather bleakly in a melancholy tone, about old communists who can't let go off the past.The War Is Over might just be Resnais' most satisfying work when it comes to somewhat coherent viewing experience. It's his first film with a clear storyline which is relatively easy to follow even if the editing was deliberately (but not self-deliberate!) ambiguous and confusing. Resnais has succeeded perfectly to relay the flow of time. Moreover, through the character played by Yves Montand the viewer can understand the director's thoughts and emotions, no matter how shattered, because he holds the pieces together. It is he through whom the viewer constructs the big picture.In The War Is Over memories are created for the future. Alain Resnais doesn't try to build the horrors of the past by newsreel footage. He relays the tragedy of the conditions by showing how people are still living in the past, how they are left with unredeemed dreams in their hands. The dream has died in Spain. Of course, Spain is still there but merely as a concrete place full of tourists. People don't understand each other. There is a major breakdown in the communication between the old and the new left. Both are dreaming of a revolution but in their own ways. The legacy of the past torments the protagonist. However, he is not only forced to recall the past endlessly but also to be unable to understand the present reality.

CAUTION: NOTES ON PLOT INCLUDEDWell, if you think this movie is about hot sex and Franco, then you could stick to Hemingway. A stunning psychodrama about a man who has seen his life burned out after decades of fighting a "good" but hopeless war, recognizes the futility, and sees another generation committing itself to figurative and literal suicide. Does he stop them? Join them? Can he have any effect at all? Does he try? See the movie. If you're into political drama a la Frankenheimer, Zinnemann, or Costa Gavras, this one is a "ten."But you're right about Genevieve Bujold. Are you ever 8-)

Spoilers herein.So many European films from this era have faded. They were about notions disguised as ideas that on reflection were less precious than we thought. But this film has grown in my experience. It somehow touches an important place deftly: perhaps the adhesive is wonder about the value of previously clear passions.At any rate, here we have misters `Marienbad' (Resnais and Vierny) exploiting the very territory they outlined in that film: but rather than reality being constructed by memory, here it is constructed in a more realistic way -- by coming and going, by rendezvous, by assignment, by getting there.If someone described what was attempted here in words, and I did not know the film, I would think it impossible. Angst of later life, the increasing emptiness of the motion, the growing concern that the motion itself is fragile, the indication of that by some chance encounters (some sexual, some mistaken), the logic behind the motion is disintegrating.But it does work. This film finds just the right emotional groove, mostly visual. Much more successfully than, say Antonioni. Part of the art is subtle annotation of what it is: Marianne is putting together a book of images of place (`I can't describe it in words'). There's a writer. There's lots of motion about swapped ID photos and all that entails. Many doors. A fair amount of time and memory folding.A life with film is a constant process of evaluating who you are, what you cast off and what you accept and incubate within. This may not turn out be a lasting friend to every viewer, but it has for this one.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.

While i was watching this movie i was feeling that it would get very interesting.But as the minutes were passing i felt more and more sleepy, nothing interesting was happenning, till the sudden end came....lucky me. Maybe that film is going to be nice for Spanish people...who knows.....