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Photos © Copyright Newmarket Films

The great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire; Faraway, So Close!) stars as Adolph Hitler in Downfall, the Oscar-nominated World War II drama written by Bernd Eichinger and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.

Peter T. Chattaway (Christianity Today Movies) writes, "Several films about Hitler have been made in the English language … but Downfall is the first in decades to be made in Germany itself. And it is precisely because Hitler and his associates are shown in all their emotional complexity that we realize just how monstrous and dehumanizing their thoughts and deeds were."

He adds, "Watching Downfall is, curiously, a little like watching The Passion of The Christ—we enter the theatre knowing the basic story, and the film takes us through all the familiar plot twists … while testing our endurance with its supposedly accurate, non-stop violence. The obvious difference, of course, is that one film is about the Son of God, and ends on a note of resurrection, whereas the other is about one of the worst governments ever known, and for the Germans, there is no clear hope in sight, even when Nazism ends; for many, the end of the war will mean not liberation, but another form of totalitarianism under the Soviets."

We couldn't find any other Downfall reviews from the religious press, but mainstream critics are giving it high marks.

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