Sophie Scholl: The Final Days

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

Throughout, Sophie exhibits the quality common to all of history's great martyrs, a preternatural calmness that perseveres despite (or perhaps because of) the inevitability of her doom.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

It's an authentic, harrowing tale of heroism.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Sophie Scholl plods along inexorably, one step after another, to its grim, sad end. It's almost unbearable.

TV Guide Ken Fox

The film is a shattering experience fueled by Jentsch's electrifying performance.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

While the film doesn't dig deep, or hit particularly hard, it neatly achieves its modest goals: presenting a real-life heroine in real-life terms. A film this fictionalized rarely feels this much like fact.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Rothemund's use of the recorded testimony, while it gives his film a startling veracity, also limits his imagination. It prevents him from delving too deeply into the psychology of these activists.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Julia Jentsch strong and graceful, quiet knockout of a performance is the film's most potent weapon.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days may sound like a history lesson, but don't be fooled. It's a horror film.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

It's a crisply made, absorbing human drama that frames its moral confrontation between good and evil in universal terms.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Rock solid performances by up-and-coming German actress Julia Jentsch as Sophie and Alexander Held ("Downfall") as Mohr along with an excellent cast of supporting players insure that no one mistakes this for a lifeless docu-drama.

Variety Derek Elley

An ace performance by 26-year-old Julia Jentsch ("The Edukators," "Snowland"), as the quietly determined Munich student who was beheaded for distributing counter-propaganda leaflets in 1943, gives pic a focused dramatic power.

Village Voice Leslie Camhi

A life so tragically and quickly extinguished presents maudlin temptations, but director Marc Rothemund ably resists them. His gripping, moving film focuses on a breathtakingly brief five-day period.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances.

Dallas Observer Jean Oppenheimer

Though we know the story's final outcome, the trial scene and its aftermath are no less shocking and affecting.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Julia Jentsch offers a brilliant example of what actors call "not playing the ending," and the awful suspense of the piece is watching as she realizes, in increments, that this is all much worse than she thought.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Everything about Sophie Scholl screams "martyr" and "saint." Jentsch will have none of it. Hers is a performance of supreme emotional control, yet clear emotional fire. The actress makes the icon human.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The film holds us rapt not through narrative suspense but through the eerie and demanding spectacle of profound moral courage, of a powerless good person in collision with absolute evil.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Rothemund gives us his sophisticated filmmaking only in the finale, which is devastating in its briskness and fury.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

The orderly and clean drama is more like theater than history come to life.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The effect of this scene is so powerful that I leaned forward like a jury member, wanting her to get away with it so I could find her innocent.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Sophie Scholl is a powerful story. But it's a little annoying how men become beside the point when the focus is on emotion. Sophie did no more or less than her brother, but he's ignored for nearly all of the movie because it's easier to stir up compassion - it's easier to manipulate the audience - when the subject is a woman.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Sophie Scholl has a certain quiet dignity that wins its audience popularity honestly.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Sophie Scholl is the subject of a feature film that has earned an Oscar nomination for a Germany she would have loved to live in.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

The script is so intellectualized that I couldn't help feeling I was witnessing not two complex people locked in struggle, but the opposed souls (and classes) of Germany: Sophie, emblem of the cultured, tolerant and enlightened humanism of the middle classes duking it out with Mohr, resentful member of a disenfranchised proletariat from whose ranks sprang Hitler's most loyal quislings.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Modest in scale but formidable in its impact.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Sophie Scholl is not as devastatingly moving as "The White Rose," but it, too, evokes awe in lesser beings.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Andre Hennicke is particularly chilling as the yappy mad dog judge who sends them to death.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

After she's forced to confess, director Marc Rothemund doesn't have much to do but marvel at her heroic defiance, and the film is overtaken by its talkiness, claustrophobia, and polarized morality.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Powerfully rendered in every respect - and another testament to how bad the Nazis are for drama.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

For most U.S. audiences, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, an Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, is going to feel more like a history lesson than a movie.