The greatest movie ever!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

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

This has to be seen to be believed! Malle seems just as well to be the victim of Zazie's dark whirlwind surrealism as the audience themselves. Never again achieved an adolescent movie character such an anarchic quality. Despite all the displays of technical outrageousness and pure buffoonery, the pic never feels as superficially sketch-like as many of Dick Lester's works. And the complete lack of warmheartedness is a relief in a picture featuring a young girl! Now that's a truly original way to declass French bourgeoisie and throw an anti-Fascist pie in their faces! And it's one of the few hommages to silent comedy (amongst sundry allusions to cinema and social topics) that really work. And it's one of Malle's best.9 out of 10 polar bears

This is one of the few movies on IMDb that I just couldn't finish watching--it was THAT bad. And, this is another example of a movie with reasonably decent IMDb reviews that seems way out of proportion. Even if it's not as bad as I think, it's hard to imagine it being a great film, that's for sure. But, once again I might just be an old crank. Read along and you be the judge.This movie was directed by Louis Malle--a very well-respected director, to say the least. However, this film just doesn't show the talents that would be so evident in films like AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS. This film just looks lousy by modern standards of film making--not especially professional or polished. This is because so much in the film is telegraphed and painfully slapstick. And, at times, the camera and music speed up to let us know "it's time to laugh"--like what you might expect in a high school pageant when someone is doing a lame Charlie Chaplin impersonation. Then, when you combine this very broad humor(?) with a foul-mouthed little brat, you have the ingredients of a thoroughly unappealing,...nay, annoying film. Stupid and unfunny slapstick and an annoying brat--it's like watching a 90 minute migraine! This movie, like the French love of Jerry Lewis, is something I just don't get.

Raymond Queneau is my favorite writer. He was one of the rare giants of french litterature who could make you really laugh out loud while you were reading one of his classics.ZAZIE DANS LE MÉTRO was his funniest novel, but if you are not fluent in french, you will miss a lot of the jokes; Queneau loved to play with the language.Fortunately, Louis Malle has done a good job in adapting the humor of Queneau, translating the novel into a more visual, slapstick, cartoon-like movie. An intelligent comedy that is it's own unique category.

Frankly, in the world of corny jokes and lightweight punchlines of the Hollywood comedies I hunger for the good old French physical comedy. Malle is one of the best ju-ju men in the business and in Zazie laughs never stop. Actually, in this movie anything ever stops as people are running rather then walking and driving rather than sitting still. The story is quite simple, a little girl is sent by her mother to Paris to her uncle and the only thing she wants really is to see subway (metro). Of course she runs away, of course everybody starting after her, of course there are some dumb cops and sinister-looking strangers... Or maybe I got it all wrong for having laughed so hard I could not read the subtitles (and my French would barely guide me through a menu in some bistro). Think of it as a live action Roadrunner movie on caffeine...