Popular reviews

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★ 17

  Every action movie is better with train sequences and this has a lot of train sequences (it’s called The Train)

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★★ 2

  "You talk about the war, I'll talk about what it costs."

  Proves itself by barely discussing the precious art (mostly a series of names hastily painted on crates), but you see almost every single life lost for it at the very moment of sacrifice.

  Nor are people's lives some exalted abstract. Their worth isn't a platitude. their sweat is their value, their labor in every way the equal of that which might go into any painting. Watch Lancaster, in a matter of a few long but unostentatiously economical shots, single-handedly repair a locomotive connecting rod.

  Plus actual fucking trains smash into each other in this, which is awesome, and oh yeah they blow up a real rail yard.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 5

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★½ 2

  In the waning days of the Nazi occupation, heroic French railroad workers attempt to stop the theft of France's cultural heritage: a train loaded with thousands of racist cartoons.

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  Review by Xebeche ★★★★★ 3

  The phrase "you could never make this movie today" does not even begin to encapsulate the enormity of The Train. You could never make this movie in 1964.

  Burt Lancaster walks across the train yard from the switch tower to his houseboat. The movie does not demand a flawlessly orchestrated background of shifting artillery vessels, marching soldiers, construction crews, smoke, and sparks. Anyone in their right mind would say, "Hey, can we not? Let's just have him entering the houseboat."

  This movie does not demand several legitimate, authentic, full speed train collisions and derailments. There are plenty of ways to cheat that.

  This movie does not demand that we see Lancaster build a mold of hot metal, shave it down,…

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  Review by Christopher McQuarrie 17

  “You talk about the war. I talk about what it costs.”

  John Frankenheimer’s extraordinarily crafted thriller about rail workers of the French resistance in the days before the liberation of Paris. A groundbreaking practical action film decades ahead of its time, with genuine substance and powerfully understated performances from Burt Lancaster and Paul Schofield, it deftly conceals a meditation on the value of art weighed against the value of human life.

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  Review by Jamelle Bouie ★★★★ 5

  A movie that shows you remarkable feats of heroism and derring-do and then asks you, at the very end, whether the lives lost were actually worth the victory.

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  Review by Nakul ★★★★★

  John Frankenheimer's THE TRAIN is a goddamn masterpiece. A big scale yet taut & tight adrenaline-fueled action flick that leaves you at the edge of your seat until the very end. It's crazy how much of a spectacle and how much fun the film is, despite the grim premise. Also the movie feels very modern, especially with its characterizations of the protagonist and antagonist. Frankenheimer used real locations, no models, big explosions, and real crashes. They actually blew up a train depot to shoot that one scene. Burt Lancaster does crazy dangerous stunts, he actually injured his leg sliding down a ladder, the limp he has towards the end of the film is real.
  I can’t wait to watch this again.

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  Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★★½ 15

  Viewed alongside Nick Langdon. Give him a follow and read his much more in depth political perspective here!

  A tight, heaving, freight of suspense, is John Frankenheimer’s WWII political thriller The Train. The camera peers through the action of a rail yard, fitting between nooks and crannies, going from high to low, utilizing Dutch angles to feel the physicality of the setting in German-occupied France. Frankenheimer’s direction is brilliant, in mainly how, he accomplished such active set pieces at real locations: see the rail yard get blown up from an aerial attack, a scene where a plane attempts to shoot down a train, another where two trains engage in a full catastrophic collision, and another where a train undergoes a softer derailment…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★

  Out of all the forms of transportations that help us get into a place much quicker or to transport any form of merch, trains might be the least deadliest (don't quote me on that), yet they make for some of the most thrilling movies with plots that may range from unstoppable vehicles or, like in the case of this flick, the tension lies on the content that lies within.

  Initially meant to be directed by Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde), star Burt Lancaster pull a sorta Kathleen Kennedy/Tom Cruise and fired the director and brought John Frankenheimer to helm the film after the star was not interested in the approach Penn was going for (a character study) and more on…

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  Review by Cormac 👑 ★★★★★ 22

  You talk about the war. I’ll talk about what it costs.

  THE TRAIN rips, roars, howls and whistles with all of the weight of a 200 ton freight cargo haul.

  Historical power, narrative gravitas, emotional oomph mired in national pride, what have you. Even the camera itself lends a 2 ton charge of its own, making its presence known like a graceful powder keg braced to go off in an instant if placed a single inch in the wrong place.

  Our titular train, naturally, becomes a character all in its own right. Pummelling and yet gliding head-first, full steam ahead into every frame as if it has a point to prove. And war-actioner movie history in the process. Hell, even…

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  Review by HKFanatic ★★★★★ 3

  This is a film of considerable thematic weight, but let's talk about verisimilitude for a moment—whatever you define as verisimilitude, "The Train" has it, recreating the final days of German-occupied Paris through deep focus black & white photography, massive sets, scores of extras, and some very real explosions and train derailments. This feels like the movie Nolan was trying to make with "Dunkirk" but John Frankenheimer nailed it, and perhaps he had an advantage by working only twenty years after the events depicted herein, but nonetheless he nailed it.

  We watch a group of men and women risk—and often give—their lives to preserve a part of French history, a part that many of them don't actually give a damn about, which…