onlinehero

I keep watching all Jesse Eisenberg's movies because I hope to prove all the critics wrong, when they say he only knows how to play one role. That role where he is always serious, monotonous and underplayed. Unfortunately he keeps proving me wrong. He has played in really great movies. The Social Network and Solitary Man are some of my favorite movies. Adventureland was also really entertaining. Zombieland was also pretty cool. But Eisenberg was the exact same person. You go watch those movies and tell me I'm wrong.

This was no exception. Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard are two extremely talented people who have played an amazing amount of great roles, but in the plot of this one, they obviously struggle immensely with nothing to work with. At a few points towards the end, the acting between Eisenberg and Fanning becomes borderline embarrassing as they try to act out a moment of mutual struggle and despair.

I honestly have a hard time saying anything about this movie. It was 2 hours of monotonous, slow-paced nothingness.

Most of the 4 stars are for the Winter's Bone-ish nature and wilderness of the movie, and the last star is for Eisenberg to do a crying scene that was fairly convincing.

I read that Paul Dano and Rooney Mara were considered for this role. Just imagine a movie that would have been.

This documentary focuses on the atrocities committed against innocent people, mainly by Stalin and other high ranking Soviet leaders in the name of Marxism and Communism prior, during, and after the Second World War.

The documentary consists of much original footage, newspaper clips, interviews with witnesses and even some present day footage, all very well edited and cut.

The story told in this documentary is the best one I've yet to see regarding horrible crimes committed against humanity, because it is very well substantiated in terms of source-material and historical argumentation. The delight of seeing this educational footage is strengthened even more due to its addressing of one of the most inconceivable facts in the post-WWII world: How Adolf Hitler was forever after unconditionally condemned by close to everyone across the globe for his crimes, and how Joseph Stalin was commemorated for aiding the Allies in liberating Europe of fascism, regardless of the fact that in total more than 20 million (some even claim up to 50 or 60 million) people was murdered by the hands of the Soviet Gulag State. A fact which nobody in the western world seems to care about.

What this documentary furthermore achieves which is what eventually made me give it the 10th star, was the fact that the story was told very honestly and very unbiased, unlike much historical media, and the scriptwriters have done an extremely well job in mastering the whole aspect of the stories, and not just focused on narrow one-sided details.

Regardless of the fact that most people see Hitler as the "far-right", and Stalin as the "far-left", this documentary raises the ultimate question: were they indeed that different, after all?