Excellent, Without a doubt!!

As Good As It Gets

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Perhaps a little "artsy-dartsy", yes. But this is still a very compelling film that shows the many shades of grey that existed between the black and the white of most war movies. It's the story of a typical German --- a young professor --- who gets swept up in events as he goes along to get along. He sees Nazism as a temporary aberration and even believes he can have a positive influence on it but gets swept up in the movement without really believing in it. Life could be good in Germany before the war if you were not Jewish and were a Nazi or at least appeared to be one. Thus are Professor John Holden and his Jewish friend and fellow world war veteran Maurice caught in the vortex. There are a few extraneous lines in the plot: Holden's senile mother, his failed marriage and the reason for it. They don't seem to serve any purpose other than to add some flesh to a fairly skinny plot. But nevertheless it is both a powerful, well performed drama and a very different glimpse into the everyday life of Nazi Germany before the war.

This is a very good and dramatic movie.Some here have criticized it because the actors had an English accent! Gosh if this is the only thing they have noticed in the movie it is really a shame.The movie shows us how an educated man, professor in a university of literature, progressively shuts his eyes to the outrageous acts of the Nazi Power. Once you put the finger in the spiral an pretend not to see what is happening before yours eyes you become an accomplice of the leaders.We see this happening every day even today. When we accept to elect at the head of our Countries men or women who have committed unjustifiable acts we compromise with ethics. In France we did that twice once in 1981 and again in 2012. We laugh of the escapades of our President, but this is not laughable and shows weaknesses in his ethics and ours who elected him which could lead to anything else. This is the main point of the movie non only the professor is at fault but all his near entourage is also playing with ethics.What is most worrying is to see that the movie did not capture a large audience. It was not distributed in France and apart of Spain which reached a million dollars plus revenues, the USA and UK did not even reach have of that.It is a very dangerous tendency which shows that in today's world Ethics are considered a secondary matter to aim for and compromise totally accepted in all aspects of our daily life.

This is an excellent film (and stage play) that does not concentrate so much on the holocaust, but how it affects one man in his personal journey through the Third Reich. Viggo Mortenson as John Halder shows his acting chops with this role, the subtlety of John's seduction is sublime. What is he seduced into, you ask? What does John Halder believe about himself that allows him to make the decisions that are put to him? Watch this film. I have seen both the play and the film and have been deeply affected each time I see it in to an empathy with the people who had to live through this hideous time. I do not excuse what happened, but have a better understanding of how it could have happened.

This is a poor film adaptation of C.P. Taylor's stage play. I can see how this drama may have been much more effective on stage; unfortunately, under Vicente Amorim's amateurish direction this story loses all its impact as a motion picture.Although others on this board have complained about Mortensen's performance, as well as the use of British accents, I happen not to agree: Mortensen's against-type performance was excellent, and the use of British accents served to constantly remind us that the characters were foreign, and, at the same time, allowed us to understand them. (Mortensen and others speaking in their native American accents would have been much more incongruous and jarring).My main complaint about this movie is that it adds absolutely nothing to our knowledge of the Holocaust. It's an entirely superfluous film.