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89Every movie about the Holocaust should be this good, but few are.
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80A potent and well-executed drama.
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80Commands attention from its very first frame and never lets up right through the fade-out. It is a splendid example of classic screen storytelling with no false steps, and Gansel's understated approach pays off with resounding emotional effect and meaning.
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75Gansel based the film on the memories of one of his grandfathers. The acting is believable; the photography, atmospheric; and the moral, unmistakable.
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75Like its singular central character, Before the Fall stands out from the pack.
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75All the paraphernalia so important to the image of the Reich, particularly the uniforms, are painstakingly rendered, bringing a heightened sense of realism to what might otherwise have been a romantic coming-of-age tale.
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This well-made World War II film from Germany is both a coming-of-age story and a critique of National Socialist ideology.
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70When movie clichés are presented with rigor and feeling, they can pack a fresh punch.
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70It's an emotionally chilly movie with a blank, inexpressive protagonist, but it gains cumulative force en route to a viscerally moving climax.
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If Before the Fall feels a tad overdetermined, it also feels emotionally honest. Calmly and carefully, Mr. Gansel makes large points with small scenes.
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The hero (played with the right amount of adolescent insouciance by Max Riemelt) is a working-class boy admitted to one of the academies for his formidable boxing skills, and through him director Dennis Gansel captures the ordinariness of Hitler's supporters.
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63The homoerotic relationship between Friedrich and Albrecht is stopped short by tragedy, but the point is made - to Friedrich and the audience - that fascism has no room for humanity.
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63Unusually compelling, even if it's treacly enough to be "The Chorus" in goose step.
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The film is a competent but callow work dealing with a monstrous subject that automatically rejects callowness.
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50Surely played better on the page than on the screen. What's left is the same old drill driven by brutal master race fervor.
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50An intermittently gripping story about an idealistic young boxer who becomes disillusioned with the Third Reich during his elite training, Napola is finally KO'd by an overdose of Nazi fetishism.
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The movie is too middlebrow to show us the superman-type sexual heroics they must've engaged in, or even allow the illicit subtext to float to the surface (as Sokurov does in Father and Son)--instead we get tepid moralizing on dehumanization in the military.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 7
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Mixed: 1 out of 7
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Negative: 0 out of 7
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JimG.5Interesting if uneven drama about awakening to disillusionment.
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ConradS.8
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PhilipJ.9