Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Juana 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.

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.

pawebster The over-long haircuts of the men, the unkempt hairstyles of some of the women, the non-period clothes, the lack of formal manners... Not for a second could I believe this was Germany in the 1930s. To make matters worse there is the casual manner of speech and the lack of any attempt to pronounce German names in anything like the correct pronunciation. Example: a young female student with her hair hanging down to her shoulders any old how, with the demeanour of a student of the 21st century, comes to Viggo Mortensen's office door, looks inside and introduces herself in a very nonchalant manner, "I'm Anne..." Even in the Germany of today this would inappropriate, let alone in pre-war days. What was the writer thinking? What was the director thinking?

James Hitchcock One might have thought that the Third Reich is a subject which has been done to death in the cinema, yet occasionally a film turns up which is able to shed new light on the subject. "Good" came out in 2008, the same year as "The Reader", another film about Nazism, but one which was much more widely publicised. John Halder is a young lecturer in the literature department of a German university in the 1930s. (Although the film is set in Germany, the first names of most characters are anglicised- for example John and Maurice rather than Johann and Moritz). When the Nazi Party comes to power in 1933, Halder seems an unlikely convert to their doctrines, as he is relatively liberal in his politics and not at all anti-Semitic- indeed, his closest friend Maurice Glückstein is Jewish. He is angry when he is ordered to stop teaching the works of Jewish authors like Marcel Proust. Yet Halder is seduced into going along with the Party. He first comes to the notice of the Nazi hierarchy when he publishes a novel in support of euthanasia, and is commissioned by them to carry out research into the same subject. He is persuaded that taking out Party membership will advance his career and is given a rank in the SS. This position is at first purely honorary, but later he is charged with more responsibilities. Halder's involvement in the party leads to the end of his friendship with Maurice; when his friend asks him for help in obtaining an exit visa so he can leave Germany, Halder fails to do so out of moral cowardice. The film ends in 1942 with Halder working in a concentration camp. The story is told against the background of Halder's personal life, including his difficult relationship with his elderly mother and the breakdown of his first marriage following an affair with a student, who becomes his second wife. What is striking about Halder's gradual moral corruption is the methods used by the Nazis to get him to co-operate. They never need to resort to threats or bullying. Nobody ever barks "Ve haff vays und means…." or some similar phrase. Even notorious real-life Nazis like Philipp Bouhler and Adolf Eichmann come across as quite reasonable. Halder is won over by flattery, by appeals to his self-interest and by playing on his quite genuine idealism. Although the title "Good" is intended ironically, there must have been many in the early thirties who persuaded themselves that the National Socialist movement could be a force for good, that it could lead to a genuine sense of national rebirth and renewal in Germany and that the its regrettable anti-Semitism was merely a temporary mania which would burn itself out once the Party had consolidated itself in power and established a firmer control over its wild young stormtroopers. When Halder hesitates about joining the Nazi Party he is won over by the arguments of his second wife Anne that the party needs good men like himself as members in order to ensure a better future for the country. I was not very impressed by Viggo Mortensen in the last film I saw him in, "A Perfect Murder", so I am happy to say that he is much better here as Halder, the man whose personal road to Hell is paved with the best of intentions. I also liked Jason Isaacs as Maurice. The theme of the film- a once liberal man seduced by Nazism, was also treated in a German- language film, Istvan Szabo's "Mephisto". I wouldn't rank "Good" quite as highly as Szabo's film, but I certainly preferred it to "The Reader" which I found empty, barren and lacking any new insights into its grim subject-matter. "Good", by contrast, does have something of interest to say about the Nazi era and, by extension, also about the temptation to collaborate with evil which arises whenever people are forced to live under totalitarian regimes. 7/10

MBunge Another entry into the "Nazis were bad" genre, what Good has going for it is an excellent examination of what it's like to be part of a society as it slides down into madness. Whether it is Hitler's Germany, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's China or the guillotine's France, the truth is that people try to live normal lives in denial as long as they can. They make excuses or rationalizations or turn a blind eye until they find themselves in a world of moral chaos. Unfortunately, there's not much here beyond that example. The theme is nothing more than "Nazis were bad" and the personal story of the main character is fragmented and disconnected from the broader tale of his country. Both man and nation descend into evil, but there's no relationship between the two. T he movie starts to make an argument that the horrors of the Third Reich grew out of the hearts and minds of ordinary Germans as much as it did their insane leaders, but never follows through on it. Good is well acted and, after a too flashback-oriented beginning, flows quite nicely. However, it lacks either enough to say about its well-covered subject or enough human drama to captivate the audience. I don't regret seeing it, but I wouldn't recommend it.John Halder (Viggo Mortensen) is a professor of literature at a German college in the late 1930s, as the Nazis are well into their rise to power. His home life is dominated by his tubercular, senile mother (Gemma Jones) and his fragile, distracted wife (Anastasia Hille). His private life mostly revolves around his Jewish psycho-analyst and best friend (Jason Isaccs) and Halder's school life has just been brightened by a beautiful young student (Jodie Whittaker). Then a novel he once wrote that advocated for merciful euthanasia has come to the attention of Hitler himself, as it nicely fits in with his delusions of how to perfect and purify human existence. That drags Halder into the SS and sees his personal importance skyrocket as his marriage dissolves and his friend is made into a pariah until Halder is forced to confront the atrocity he has become part of.This is supposed to be a film about how evil triumphs when good men do nothing, with Halder playing the role of such a good man. He's not really good, though. John Halder is nice, which is not the same thing. Nice is passive. It's polite and courteous and obliging. Good is active. You're not good unless you're doing good. Halder isn't a good man who flinches in the face of evil. He's a nice man who never wanted to make a fuss. There's a difference between the two and I don't think these filmmakers understood that. Because of that, they fail to link Halder's decisions or hesitations with either his personal degeneration or the souring of his civilization. He's someone caught up in something bigger than himself, not someone whose actions led to his downfall and serves as a metaphor for what happened to Germany.It's a shame. That sort of depth would have made this a great film because the surface is a finely woven knit. I don't think I've seen another motion picture that was better than Good and helping the viewer understand that German didn't become Nazi Germany overnight. It took years and a million little steps to reach war and Holocaust and for a long time, perfectly reasonable people could dismiss each little step as unimportant and absurd. And even when those steps became too menacing and deadly to deny, it was too late to raise a fuss without losing everything gained while the problem was ignored. Collective guilt has been shoveled upon the Germans, yet the dynamic that drove them wasn't much different from Americans who tolerated slavery and segregation. The founding and forging of America is bound up with the virtual genocide of the Indian nations. The actual genocide of the Jews was just more rapid, more intentional, more comprehensive and more recent.If you'd like a smart, but not all that deep, trip back into the world of Aryan supremacy, Good is not a bad choice. If you're looking for something on the topic that is profound or deeply moving, you should probably choose something else.