At this point, it’s impossible to say World War II films are rare. The world’s most recent global conflict was a dire warning against wanton violence, and its inherent lessons to humanity are (unfortunately) more prescient than ever. Many of these films focus on the mortality of common soldiers, while others highlight the brutality of mechanized warfare and uplift the heroic soldiers who fought and died to give humanity a brief reprieve from the clutches of fascism. However, as with any war, there are also plenty of political thrillers.
One such film, Downfall, was released in 2004 to an abundance of praise, and over 20 years later, it still enjoys a 90% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it’s also one of the most controversial World War II films ever made. By some assessments, its problematic elements are only outpaced by literal wartime propaganda. Others, like historian and professor Hermann Graml,...
One such film, Downfall, was released in 2004 to an abundance of praise, and over 20 years later, it still enjoys a 90% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it’s also one of the most controversial World War II films ever made. By some assessments, its problematic elements are only outpaced by literal wartime propaganda. Others, like historian and professor Hermann Graml,...
- 2/6/2025
- by Meaghan Daly
- CBR
'Downfall' movie: Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler 'Downfall' movie: Overlong and overwrought World War II drama lifted by several memorable performances Oliver Hirschbiegel's German box office hit Downfall / Der Untergang is a generally engrossing psychological-historical drama whose emotional charge is diluted by excessive length, an overabundance of characters, and a tendency to emphasize the more obvious aspects of the narrative. Several key performances – including Bruno Ganz's now iconic Adolf Hitler – help to lift Downfall above the level of myriad other World War II movies. Nazi Germany literally goes under In Downfall, which by the end of 2004 had been seen by more than 4.5 million German moviegoers, Nazi Germany is about to lose the war. In his underground bunker, Adolf Hitler (Bruno Ganz) grows increasingly out of touch with reality as he sees his dream of Deutschland über alles go kaput. Some of those under his command are equally incapable of thinking coherently.
- 5/10/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
A cerebral film based on a memoir by Hitler's private secretary lifts the lid on Feathers McGraw's role in the Führer's overthrow
Downfall (2004)
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Entertainment grade: A–
History grade: A–
On 20 April 1945, as the second world war drew to its conclusion, Soviet forces began to shell the centre of Berlin.
People
The film is bookended by documentary footage of the splendidly named Traudl Humps, Adolf Hitler's private secretary from 1942-45. In 1947, she wrote a memoir. It was published in 2002 under her less thrilling married name, Traudl Junge. The film draws extensively on the book, especially for the relationship between Hitler (Bruno Ganz, in the performance of a lifetime) and his girlfriend, Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler). Junge paints Eva as a needy, delusional figure – dancing around her old living room "in a desperate frenzy, like a woman who has already felt the faint breath of death". Another eyewitness,...
Downfall (2004)
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Entertainment grade: A–
History grade: A–
On 20 April 1945, as the second world war drew to its conclusion, Soviet forces began to shell the centre of Berlin.
People
The film is bookended by documentary footage of the splendidly named Traudl Humps, Adolf Hitler's private secretary from 1942-45. In 1947, she wrote a memoir. It was published in 2002 under her less thrilling married name, Traudl Junge. The film draws extensively on the book, especially for the relationship between Hitler (Bruno Ganz, in the performance of a lifetime) and his girlfriend, Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler). Junge paints Eva as a needy, delusional figure – dancing around her old living room "in a desperate frenzy, like a woman who has already felt the faint breath of death". Another eyewitness,...
- 5/16/2013
- by Alex von Tunzelmann
- The Guardian - Film News
Der Untergang / Downfall (2004) Direction: Oliver Hirschbiegel Cast: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juliane Köhler, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Heino Ferch, Thomas Kretschmann Screenplay: Bernd Eichinger; from Joachim Fest's book Untergang: Hitler und das Ende des Dritten Reiches / Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich and Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller's Bis zur letzten Stunde / Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary Oscar Movies Recommended with Reservations Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler in Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall Oliver Hirschbiegel's German box-office hit Der Untergang / Downfall is a generally effective war drama, whose emotional power is marred by excessive length, an overabundance of characters, and a certain tendency to emphasize the more obvious aspects of the story. In Downfall, which by the end of 2004 had ad been seen by more than 4.5 million German filmgoers, Nazi Germany is about to lose the war. In his underground [...]...
- 2/4/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
By Christopher Stipp
The Archives, Right Here
Check out my other column, This Week In Trailers, at SlashFilm.com and follow me on Twitter under the name: Stipp
Little Fockers - Screening
Live in Phoenix or the nearby environs? Interested in seeing Little Fockers on December 16? Then, pal, I have just the ticket for you. In fact, I have a lot of tickets so by all means shoot me a line at Christopher_Stipp@yahoo.com and I’ll see about hooking you up with passes to see it.
Need to know more? Here’s some information:
This holiday season come Little Fockers the third installment in this blockbuster series (Meet The Parents and Meet the Fockers.) The test of wills between Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) and Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) escalates to new heights as Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) and Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) and the family...
The Archives, Right Here
Check out my other column, This Week In Trailers, at SlashFilm.com and follow me on Twitter under the name: Stipp
Little Fockers - Screening
Live in Phoenix or the nearby environs? Interested in seeing Little Fockers on December 16? Then, pal, I have just the ticket for you. In fact, I have a lot of tickets so by all means shoot me a line at Christopher_Stipp@yahoo.com and I’ll see about hooking you up with passes to see it.
Need to know more? Here’s some information:
This holiday season come Little Fockers the third installment in this blockbuster series (Meet The Parents and Meet the Fockers.) The test of wills between Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) and Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) escalates to new heights as Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) and Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) and the family...
- 12/10/2010
- by Christopher Stipp
I’m loving this project more and more with each film, there is something truly magical about watching some of these amazing films for the first time ever like 12 Angry Men, The Apartment, Rope and Double Indemnity and in this weeks round up I’ve added another incredible film to my collection with the German stunner Der Untergang.
The other four films all offered something enjoyably different with High Noon being a particular standout which has kick started my love for the Western movie genre. I revisited Avatar for the third time which was interesting to see again since the hype has died down, ventured again to Edgar Wright’s perfect Zombie movie “Shaun of the Dead” and had a surprisingly enjoyable watch of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. Again another fine week of movies that all deserve to be in the Top 250 and still Mulholland Drive is the only film...
The other four films all offered something enjoyably different with High Noon being a particular standout which has kick started my love for the Western movie genre. I revisited Avatar for the third time which was interesting to see again since the hype has died down, ventured again to Edgar Wright’s perfect Zombie movie “Shaun of the Dead” and had a surprisingly enjoyable watch of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. Again another fine week of movies that all deserve to be in the Top 250 and still Mulholland Drive is the only film...
- 4/12/2010
- by Gary Phillips
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
It used to be a simple matter of us (good) versis Nazis (bad), but now a new kind of war film is emerging, says John Patterson
As far as movies are concerned, the first world war was all one story: the pity of war, the futility of those four years of mud and wire, iron and fire. Paths Of Glory, King & Country, Birdsong, Blackadder Goes Forth – the same essential elements are common to them all. You can get existential or poetic about the Great War, you can marvel at the heroics, but in the end, its lesson, its moral, is its very pointlessness.
The second world war, by contrast, is a war of many stories, of diverse locations and multifarious moral dilemmas (such as the one delineated in new German movie Anonyma: "How do I not get raped by Russian soldiers every day, and will it cost my soul?"). This...
As far as movies are concerned, the first world war was all one story: the pity of war, the futility of those four years of mud and wire, iron and fire. Paths Of Glory, King & Country, Birdsong, Blackadder Goes Forth – the same essential elements are common to them all. You can get existential or poetic about the Great War, you can marvel at the heroics, but in the end, its lesson, its moral, is its very pointlessness.
The second world war, by contrast, is a war of many stories, of diverse locations and multifarious moral dilemmas (such as the one delineated in new German movie Anonyma: "How do I not get raped by Russian soldiers every day, and will it cost my soul?"). This...
- 2/6/2010
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
With HeyUGuys recently posting the Top films of the Decade as voted by you the reader, I thought I would look back into noughties myself and do my own top 10 films of the last decade as I was a bit disappointed with a majority of the top 10 choices like Kill Bill, There will be Blood and Donnie Darko.
Searching for my Decadian film winners was a great experience, going through vast amount of films from the last 10 years (which has flown by) and picking my personal 10 favourite films. It was a difficult challenge choosing them and also coming up with my 10 runner up movies from each year as there were so many quality films to pick from and I had to make some difficult choices in letting some stunning films miss out like Children of Men, District 9, Hurt Locker, Let the Right one in, The Departed etc. And so here are my choices,...
Searching for my Decadian film winners was a great experience, going through vast amount of films from the last 10 years (which has flown by) and picking my personal 10 favourite films. It was a difficult challenge choosing them and also coming up with my 10 runner up movies from each year as there were so many quality films to pick from and I had to make some difficult choices in letting some stunning films miss out like Children of Men, District 9, Hurt Locker, Let the Right one in, The Departed etc. And so here are my choices,...
- 1/10/2010
- by Gary Phillips
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Downfall
BERLIN -- One of the best war movies ever made, Downfall is a powerful and artistically masterful re-creation of the last days of the Third Reich. A film that will set new standards in the art of committing history to celluloid, it is sure to spark strong word-of-mouth and generate ticket sales on the art house circuit -- and could pick up major awards.
Downfall tells not only the historically accurate tale of the last days of Hitler and his henchmen, which they spent in a bunker under the streets of Berlin, but also, in state-of-the-art battle sequences, of the civilians and soldiers fighting and dying on the savaged streets above as the Soviet Army turned the city into a pile of rubble.
The combined power of the chamber play unraveling in the bunker and the horrible epic slaughter in the streets above (which, of course, Hitler could have stopped at any time by surrendering) elevates the film from a historical re-enactment to a full-fledged war movie, on par with Saving Private Ryan and Das Boot in every regard. With its horrific and realistic depiction of the human beings who caused all this, Downfall could be the most important movie ever made about World War II.
The script, written masterfully by producer Bernd Eichinger (The Name of the Rose, The House of the Spirits), closely follows the definitive book Inside Hitler's Bunker, by renowned historian Joachim Fest, as well as on the reminiscences of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, whose story was turned into an excellent interview/documentary under the title Blind Spot (two sections of the interview frame the dramatized action of Downfall). Although the young Junge acts as a kind of main character, Eichinger has resisted the temptation to invent any nonhistoric characters for the viewer to sympathize with. What we get in Downfall is as close to what really happened as we will ever see on celluloid.
The actors are on the money, which makes Oliver Hirschbiegel's direction look nothing less than brilliant. And the same goes for An Dorthe Braker's inspired casting. Indeed, a major difference between this film and earlier depictions of Hitler is that these actors are all believably German, neither just blond and blue-eyed stereotypes nor craven caricatures of evil. It is easy to imagine any of them as the guy next door -- or even as yourself, given the circumstances. This is Hirschbiegel's artistic triumph: He makes sure we see that the "face of evil" didn't come from outer space but from among us.
Juliane Koehler plays Eva Braun with a weird, demented carelessness -- she is almost ecstatically happy to die with her Adolf (whom she marries at the very end), but at the same time she seems stupidly to have no real comprehension of the destruction going on around her. She is Marie Antoinette in a dirndl. When Magda Goebbels, played dignified and murderous by Corinna Harfouch, poisons her own children so they won't have to face the disappointment of growing up in a world without Nazism, you wonder whether the Third Reich was state or religion.
But the sensation of the film is Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) in a stunning performance as Hitler. Physically, Ganz slumps, shrinks and scowls -- Hitler's health was failing at this point, and Ganz captures the sunken little man perfectly. Most importantly, not once does he slip into a caricature of evil. Ganz shows you a human being. When he refuses to leave Berlin and save himself, you can see that in his mind he is performing an act of heroism.
The perverted humanity of Hitler and his henchmen may be a problem for some reviewers and community leaders, who may fear that neo-Nazis will watch the movie and be moved, not horrified, by Hitler's last days. That's a small risk, though, for a film that succeeds on all levels in saying so much not only about the horrors of the 20th century, but about human nature as well.
Downfall (Der Untergang)
World Sales: EOS Distribution
Production company: Constantin Film
Co-Producers NDR, WDR, Degeto Film, ORF and EOS Production and RAI Cinema
CREDITS
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Writer: Bernd Eichinger, based on the book Inside Hitler's Bunker by Joachim Fest and "Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary" by Traudl Junge and Melissa Mueller
Producer: Bernd Eichinger
Production Executive: Christine Rothe
Director of photography: Rainer Klausmann
Production designer: Bernd Lepel
Music: Stephan Zacharias
Casting: An Dorthe Braker
Costume designer: Claudia Bobsin
Editor: Hans Funck
Special effects: Die Nefzers
Sound Design: Stefan Busch
Sound: Roland Winke
Sound mixing: Michael Kranz
Line producer: Silvia Tollmann
Cast:
Adolf Hitler: Bruno Ganz
Traudl Junge: Alexandra Maria Lara
Magda Goebbels: Corinna Harfouch
Joseph Goebbels: Ulrich Matthes
Eva Braun: Juliane Kohler
Albert Speer: Heino Ferch
Prof. Schenck: Christian Berkel
Prof. Dr. Werner Haase: Matthias Habich
Hermann Fegelein: Thomas Kretschmann
Helmuth Weidling: Michael Mendl
Wilhelm Mohnke: Andre Hennicke
Heinrich Himmler Ulrich Noethen
No MPAA rating
Running time -- 150 minutes...
Downfall tells not only the historically accurate tale of the last days of Hitler and his henchmen, which they spent in a bunker under the streets of Berlin, but also, in state-of-the-art battle sequences, of the civilians and soldiers fighting and dying on the savaged streets above as the Soviet Army turned the city into a pile of rubble.
The combined power of the chamber play unraveling in the bunker and the horrible epic slaughter in the streets above (which, of course, Hitler could have stopped at any time by surrendering) elevates the film from a historical re-enactment to a full-fledged war movie, on par with Saving Private Ryan and Das Boot in every regard. With its horrific and realistic depiction of the human beings who caused all this, Downfall could be the most important movie ever made about World War II.
The script, written masterfully by producer Bernd Eichinger (The Name of the Rose, The House of the Spirits), closely follows the definitive book Inside Hitler's Bunker, by renowned historian Joachim Fest, as well as on the reminiscences of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, whose story was turned into an excellent interview/documentary under the title Blind Spot (two sections of the interview frame the dramatized action of Downfall). Although the young Junge acts as a kind of main character, Eichinger has resisted the temptation to invent any nonhistoric characters for the viewer to sympathize with. What we get in Downfall is as close to what really happened as we will ever see on celluloid.
The actors are on the money, which makes Oliver Hirschbiegel's direction look nothing less than brilliant. And the same goes for An Dorthe Braker's inspired casting. Indeed, a major difference between this film and earlier depictions of Hitler is that these actors are all believably German, neither just blond and blue-eyed stereotypes nor craven caricatures of evil. It is easy to imagine any of them as the guy next door -- or even as yourself, given the circumstances. This is Hirschbiegel's artistic triumph: He makes sure we see that the "face of evil" didn't come from outer space but from among us.
Juliane Koehler plays Eva Braun with a weird, demented carelessness -- she is almost ecstatically happy to die with her Adolf (whom she marries at the very end), but at the same time she seems stupidly to have no real comprehension of the destruction going on around her. She is Marie Antoinette in a dirndl. When Magda Goebbels, played dignified and murderous by Corinna Harfouch, poisons her own children so they won't have to face the disappointment of growing up in a world without Nazism, you wonder whether the Third Reich was state or religion.
But the sensation of the film is Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) in a stunning performance as Hitler. Physically, Ganz slumps, shrinks and scowls -- Hitler's health was failing at this point, and Ganz captures the sunken little man perfectly. Most importantly, not once does he slip into a caricature of evil. Ganz shows you a human being. When he refuses to leave Berlin and save himself, you can see that in his mind he is performing an act of heroism.
The perverted humanity of Hitler and his henchmen may be a problem for some reviewers and community leaders, who may fear that neo-Nazis will watch the movie and be moved, not horrified, by Hitler's last days. That's a small risk, though, for a film that succeeds on all levels in saying so much not only about the horrors of the 20th century, but about human nature as well.
Downfall (Der Untergang)
World Sales: EOS Distribution
Production company: Constantin Film
Co-Producers NDR, WDR, Degeto Film, ORF and EOS Production and RAI Cinema
CREDITS
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Writer: Bernd Eichinger, based on the book Inside Hitler's Bunker by Joachim Fest and "Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary" by Traudl Junge and Melissa Mueller
Producer: Bernd Eichinger
Production Executive: Christine Rothe
Director of photography: Rainer Klausmann
Production designer: Bernd Lepel
Music: Stephan Zacharias
Casting: An Dorthe Braker
Costume designer: Claudia Bobsin
Editor: Hans Funck
Special effects: Die Nefzers
Sound Design: Stefan Busch
Sound: Roland Winke
Sound mixing: Michael Kranz
Line producer: Silvia Tollmann
Cast:
Adolf Hitler: Bruno Ganz
Traudl Junge: Alexandra Maria Lara
Magda Goebbels: Corinna Harfouch
Joseph Goebbels: Ulrich Matthes
Eva Braun: Juliane Kohler
Albert Speer: Heino Ferch
Prof. Schenck: Christian Berkel
Prof. Dr. Werner Haase: Matthias Habich
Hermann Fegelein: Thomas Kretschmann
Helmuth Weidling: Michael Mendl
Wilhelm Mohnke: Andre Hennicke
Heinrich Himmler Ulrich Noethen
No MPAA rating
Running time -- 150 minutes...
- 10/5/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Singapore fest lineup has political tone
SINGAPORE -- With a selection most distinctive for its politically and religiously controversial films, the 16th Singapore International Film Festival is set to run Thursday to May 2 with 350 features, shorts and animation titles from 45 countries. Among the films screening are Michael Moore's Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine; the 9/11-themed collection of shorts 11'09"01; Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer's Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, documenting an interview with Adolf Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge; and Peter Mullan's 1960s Catholic drama The Magdalene Sisters.
- 4/15/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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