IslandGuru Who payed the critics

Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Blake Rivera If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

steveo122 The story of a 'good' man in 1933 Germany who is slowly seduced into the glory/practicality/inevitability of National Socialism should have been powerful. It would still make a very powerful mini-series and right now would be the time that is ripe for it. The primary fault is that, with the exception of Mortensen, the entire cast is British (not that there's anything wrong with that) and while they avoided having actors speak with phony German accents, the Very British-ness of the thing, set in Berlin, just nagged throughout. I think one time someone says something in German. The secondary fault is that the script is taken from a stage-play and not adapted with 'powerful film' in mind. The passion behind the project is apparent but this is one time when the original source could have used some 'punching up' fine tuning. The tertiary fault (I had to look that up) is that Mortensen works too hard to create a character too timorous for 'us' to apply our empathy. Not so much 'bad' as disappointing.

Diana Grogg 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.

MrGKB ...as onomatopoeic as it could have been, "Good" boasts a motivated, talented cast (Viggo "The Road" Mortensen, Jason "Harry Potter..." Isaacs, Gemma "ditto..." Jones, and Mark "Kick-Ass" Strong, among others), some nice lensing by Andrew "Precious" Dunn, and all-round quality production values, but in the end, the script by an industry tyro fails to live up to or expand upon the source material: Brit playwright C. P. Taylor's brilliant 1981 stage play. In a nutshell, "Good" limns the tragic descent into the "banality of evil" of a pre-WWII German literature professor who is drawn into the cruel orbit of Nazism (and specifically the SS) and ultimately betrays everyone near and dear to him, all the while rationalizing that he is only a "good" man doing the "right" thing. Taylor's script is brilliant, engaging, horrifying and emotionally stunning. This film version is not. It does its best to capture the heart of the play, but fails to illuminate its soul.Partly the failure is due to the traditional cinematic approach, and the inevitable distance it creates with its audience. In the play, the main character, John Halder (Mortensen), continually breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly to his audience, a tactic that film is only rarely able to justify dramatically, and even more rarely pull off with any success (take a moment; try to think of how many movies you've seen where that sort of thing works. Can't think of too many, can you?) Nonetheless, it's somewhat of a change of pace from more conventional movies about the Holocaust, in that it focuses on the human nature of the instigators rather than the victims, and as far as that goes is worth a watch, but if you ever get the chance, go see a production of the play (should you be so lucky to have the opportunity); it's miles ahead of this well-intentioned but unsatisfying film (I've given it a five instead of the six I would have otherwise awarded it for that specific reason). You'll be glad you did.

Paul Cooney My one big beef with this movie is the use of British accents, which is just ridiculous...and ironic. Since the British and the Germans in WW2 were enemies, it's just silly to use British accents for Germans - especially in a WW2/pre war era movie. Are there no German actors? Could they not even try for a German accent?Aside from this movie, I have an issue with the fact that directors seem to think that everyone spoke with British accents in the past. WTF. Did we speak with British accents in ancient Rome (ie Gladiator, Rome, etc)? No. Enough with the British accents as the default for movies based in the past, it's time to be more authentic to history.