Review: 'Port of Shadows' restored to its poetic realist glory

It was the only French film of the 1930s, Simone de Beauvoir reported, that she and Jean-Paul Sartre jointly admired, largely for "the fog of despair enveloping the entire film." Yet it was banned by the Vichy government on moral grounds, accused of contributing to a national malaise that led to the German occupation and condemned by a French Catholic organization for telling "a profoundly demoralizing, somber story." It's "Port of Shadows," one of the treasures of French cinema now newly restored to its original glory.

By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Film Critic

January 31, 2013