More a tendency than a movement, poetic realism is not strongly unified like Soviet montage or French Impressionism but were individuals who created this lyrical style.
[2] They usually have a fatalistic view of life with their characters living on the margins of society, either as unemployed members of the working class or as criminals.
They are "poetic" because of a heightened aestheticism that sometimes draws attention to the representational aspects of the films.
Composers who worked on these films included Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Joseph Kosma, and Maurice Jaubert.
[1] The movement had a significant impact on later film movements, in particular Italian neorealism (many of the neorealists, most notably Luchino Visconti, worked with poetic realist directors before starting their own careers as film critics and directors) and the French New Wave.