everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

or from the past. simple. and powerful. for the script, the acting and the different problems who defines a concert of Bolshoi Theater. the humor, the memories, the desire to create the present as revenge of the past failure, the strange characters and the flavor of different cultures, mixed, defined one by the other are marks of Mihaileanu. the Concert preserves each of them and use the nuances in a splendid fresco about art and success. it is something magic in this film. the scenes about past, the meetings, the old secrets, the crumbs of the every day reality , the respiration of a dream who becomes reality. a film about a trip to yourself.

The themes are familiar, the characters are interesting but not complex, the script is uncomplicated, the humour comfortable – the story itself is straightforward, but the sum of these largely unremarkable parts is a truly uplifting piece of cinema. It is a great pleasure to discover that a film like The Concert can still exist in a cinematic landscape over-shadowed by violence, sexual objectification, product placement and the commercial imperative. Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds, Now You Seen Me) is probably the best known face in a largely eastern European cast, but it is Aleksey Guskov who steals the show as the Maestro with an endearing performance. Thank goodness (and thank Rumania director Radu Mihaileanu) for cinema with a good heart and a positive message, and characters motivated by kindness and artistic vision. The finale is a heart-warming emotional crescendo. It is genuinely satisfying to see a happy outcome, and well worth the modest investment of time to experience entertainment that is life-affirming, which, sadly, cannot be said about the majority of cinema these days.

I ordered this DVD version from Amazon not realizing that it was dubbed. Amazon has taken steps to update the site. The Distribution for North America is completely dubbed in English and not a good dub at that. I did order from the UK the Original Russian/French version with English subtitles, Amazon thought my DVD Player would handle it, but the DVD Player alerted me that my TV was too old to play PAL. I did get it to play on my computer, but that defeats the whole purpose.I saw the Original at SIFF, took my Brother and his wife to see it. We were all crying at the end. The Original is a 10, and I am also aware this is related to Orchestra from Japan. Still I rate the Original a 10, the English Dubbing a 6.

Andrei Filipov, a talented Russian conductor, has been reduced to being a janitor in the theater that he loved and showed a promise some years ago. He had the audacity to defy the then president Brezhnev when he gave the order to fire all the Jewish musicians of the orchestra, by going ahead in a performance with all the Jewish musicians the higher ups wanted to banish. In fact, Filipov suffers the ultimate humiliation as he is conducting the Tchaikovski violin concerto. Ivan Gavrilov, the head of the Bolshoi comes to him on stage and proceeds to break his baton.Some years later, Filipov cleaning the Bolshoi's manager office, reads an incoming fax in which the head of the Chatelet theater in Paris is asking his Russian counterpart for an appearance since a slot has become available. Andrei has no problem in stealing the fax and sets out a plan in which to dupe the French into believing the real Bolshoi will be appearing at the Chatelet. For that he must ask his old rival, Gavrilov, to help him at last finish his rendition of the famous concert."Le concert" is a Russian-French co-production conceived and directed by Radu Mihaileanu, although it is based on a story by Hector Cabello Reyes and Thiery Degrandi. The comedy is basically seen from the Russian point of view. Andrei is able to assemble a motley crew of old Jewish musicians that were banned from playing in their native land because of prevailing prejudice against talented people that were seen as a threat to the government because of their intelligence.Andrei Filipov, through Gavrilov, demands the present of a young French violinist, Anne-Marie Jacquet, whose past, we get to know, has a connection with the maestro. The revelation is not earth shattering since the viewer has already guessed why Andrei wants Anne-Marie as the soloist for the Tchaikovski.Aleksei Guskov appears as Andrei Filipov, the disgraced musician. His sidekick is played by Dmitri Nazarov. Melanie Laurent makes an appealing Anne-Marie. Miou-Miou, Laurent Bateau and Francois Berland are seen in supporting roles.