All My Loved Ones

An excellent filmmaking that pays tribute to Nicolas Winton, who – in my opinion – is the only one deserving respect for what he wasn’t doing it for money or fame, but for a desire to help. And nowadays that’s as unpopular as it used to be then. Right, Schindler…? (25/01/2016)

A very nicely shot drama with careful casting, professional performances, and quality directing. Giving it less than four stars wouldn't be fair while giving it five stars would mean ignoring the fact that it's a very predictable work because All My Loved Ones fall into the category of solemn films primarily intended for broadcast on television on the occasion of relevant anniversaries. Practically everything is clear and halfway through the film, I deduced who will be saved and when the next train with children will depart abroad. Besides predictability, Mináč's film suffers from a certain academicism in an effort to do really good work. Otherwise, it is appropriately emotional, sad, and poetic. Overall impression: 80%. (09/03/2010)

Mináč and Hubač's film All My Loved Ones is an exemplary project from which Czech cinema should take example more often. The documentary framework and the tightly-woven story of a single family charting not only the pivotal years but also the calm before the storm is the perfect recipe for a brilliant film. The acting stalwarts managed to make the most of themselves and forget about the overly cheap projects in which they usually dilute their talent. I enjoyed the excellent performances of Abrhám, Šafránková, Bartoška, Brodská, Labuda, and Vetchý as if I was seeing them for the first time. And after experiencing another decade of Czech cinema, I am truly sorry that similarly ambitious projects like Fall of the Innocent turned into pure farce. It is as if the filmmakers forgot the basic recipe for the interpretation of human stories, which were swept away by the war and which managed to resist likely all formal extremes in feature films, among which the revolutionary Distant Journey dominates. Above all, it is necessary to become part of the destiny of those people in ordinary situations, to experience it with them, so that afterward the destruction is not just an empty phrase from a textbook overview. (27/09/2011)

A beautiful film, but the most emotional part is the documentary sequence at the end, when Sir Winston finally meets the Jewish children he escorted during the war. Otherwise, the story approaches those events from the other side, showing the unimaginable dilemma of a family that slowly realises that they have no future and must send their son to a foreign land. The actors are all excellent and it’s nice that the film refrains from sweeping emotional gestures – knowing what is going on is more than enough. And yet, I didn’t feel the burden that would correspond to the tragic premise and the more than ambivalent outcome. The ideas are there, what is missing is a more thoughtful distribution and escalation – it should be a film celebrating success, but what should prevail in the eyes of the characters and the viewers is grief. Schindler’s List was great at that, it was a lot more effective at finding the smouldering humanity in the midst of the cold-blooded Nazi machinery. Sure, All My Loved Ones is more about the transition between a sunny and a cloudy period of life, but it’s missing a stronger author’s argument and vision. 70% (07/02/2021)