The infamous Vel' d'Hiv Roundup is the focus of this gripping French drama starring Melanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds, Beginners) and Jean Reno (The Da Vinci Code, The Professional). Two days after Bastille Day in 1942, French police carried out an extensive raid of Jews in Greater Paris. More than 13,000 people were arrested, among them 4,000 children, consigned to several miserable days in Paris's Velodrome d'Hiver stadium before being shipped to internment camps within France, and finally to Auschwitz. Long a taboo subject in France--Jacques Chirac issued a public apology only in 1995--the raid and its political backdrop are brought to stirring life in writer-director Rose Bosch's detailed scenario. With a meticulously constructed script based on extensive research and first-hand accounts, La Rafle (The Roundup) became a big box-office hit in France, and its audiences included thousands of young people who came to learn about a dark chapter in their country's history.

Sorry, I may have gotten up on the wrong side of bed today, but: Oh, look, it's another movie about Jews and Nazis and about another European country "confessing it's guilt" and "facing its past". If I hadn't been force-fed that very scenario for twenty years already, I'd probably even give a damn. There must be a dozen films - made for TV and the big screen - in Germany alone that have dealt with this topic at length. And my interest in it has long since been saturated. The Nazis were bad. And those who cooperated with them - for whatever reason - were also bad. I get it, okay? I got it the first time I heard about it, and that must have been more than 20 effin' years ago. We all get it!

I'm sure it's well done, and it has Jean Reno in it, which is always a plus. But the way it is, all I can see is a movie with great production values whose story already bores me to death. I'm just so fed up with this topic. Give me a movie about civilians, politicians and soldiers in London during the Blitz. Give me one about the post-WW II Lithuanian resistance. Give me a good one about the Spanish Civil War. Hell, for all I care, make one about the clash between Slovakians and Hungarians when Czechoslovakia broke apart. But please, give me something other than another repeat of a theme I've heard, watched and read a thousand times already!

Quite frankly, I've reached a point where if I'm given the choice between yet another moral piece about WW II and an Uwe Boll movie parodying another Uwe Boll movie, I'll opt for the Uwe Boll movie.

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Yes, the Vichy French collaborated with Nazi Germany, and they did so because they thought it'd allow them to be an equal in the New Europe they thought a Nazi victory would create. But I'd like you to consider the following: by collaborating, France didn't suffer the great hardships that the eastern European nations suffered. Total French war dead amounted to 567,600, civilian and military. Poland, on the other hand, resisting to the best of its abilities even after its occupation, suffered 5,620,000 casualties, ten times as many as the more populous French. I know the comparison is off because of the impact of Nazi policies, but still: who made the wiser choice? It's easy to condemn people three generations down the line because they failed to meet our moral standards. Maybe from time to time we should consider the fact that the only reason we have these moral standards is because in the last three generations we didn't have to face an attack and the occupation by a totalitarian regime? It's always easy to be morally upright if it's not tied to any obligations or dangers.