Adam Resurrected (2008) User Reviews

Sanity is pleasant and calm, but there is no greatness, no true joy...

[lastliberal · 7/10 · 25 October 2009]

Willem Dafoe is now Commandant Klein, and he is in charge of a concentration camp. Previously, he was a guest at a show of one of Germany's greatest clowns, Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum), and now Stein stands before him in his camp. He graciously agrees to free Stein if he does two things, (1) act like a dog for his amusement, and (2) play the violin while his wife and daughter march to their deaths in the gas chamber.

Having lost his humanity, Adam is in and out of mental institutions while living in Israel. The patients love him, the doctor (Derek Jacobi) is fascinated with his case, and the head nurse (Ayelet Zurer)wants his body - why, I could never figure out.

Adam comes upon a young boy (Tudor Rapiteanu) in the cellar of the institution and begins a transformation that not only cures the boy, but restores his humanity.

The back and forth flashback may be disturbing to some, but it is essential to the story, and gives us a chance to enjoy the excellence that Dafoe brings to the screen.

Goldblum is excellent, as he always is.

Weird Film

[claudio_carvalho · 6/10 · 27 October 2016]

In Berlin, the Jewish Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum) is a successful artist that works with his wife and two daughters in a cabaret. During the World War II, Adam and his family are sent to a concentration camp and the cruel Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe), who was his fan, assigns Adam to become his "dog" to entertain him. Adam has to live like a dog with another dog, Rex, while tries to convince Klein to save his wife and his little daughter that are sent to the ovens. After the war, Adam is sent to a mental institution in Israel for Survivors of the Holocaust under the care of the psychiatric Dr. Nathan Gross (Derek Jacobi) and becomes a leader among the patients. He also has a mistress, the nurse Gina Grey (Ayelet Zurer), who loves kinky sex. One day, Adam smells a dog in the institute, which is forbidden, and he finds a boy that was raised chained in a basement and behaves like a dog. Adam recalls his period as a dog in the concentration camp and gets close to the dog-like boy and their journey together begins.

"Adam Resurrected" is a weird film about a man and a boy that have been turned into dog. The strange plot is supported by a fantastic performance of Jeff Goldblum that deserved at least a nomination to the Oscar. Most of the characters are bizarre and this movie is somehow fascinating and seems to be written by a mad writer. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Adam – Memórias de Uma Guerra" ("Adam – Memories of a War")

Goldblum Gives Tremendous Performance In Mixed Holocaust Film

[CitizenCaine · 6/10 · 30 May 2010]

Paul Schrader directed Adam Resurrected, a tale about a Jewish vaudeville entertainer during the Weimar period who later suffered dehumanization at the hands of a concentration camp commandant and survived. Noah Stollman adapted the screenplay from Yoram Kaniuk's novel of 40 years before, Schrader fashions another story with his infamous thematic elements of man vs. himself and man vs. man while simultaneously wavering between reality and psychological breakdown.

Jeff Goldblum is Adam, a Jewish entertainer who is recognized by Commandant Klein (Willem DaFoe), at a concentration, as a talented comedian/musician, etc. from the 1930's. DaFoe dehumanizes Goldblum by making him mimic the actions of a dog, and years later, Goldblum flashes back to these events as he struggles to maintain his sanity and corral survivor's guilt. Derek Jacobi plays Dr. Nathan Gross at the sanitarium for survivor's where Adam (Goldblum) ends up. Once at the sanitarium in the 1960's, Adam (Goldblum) meets a boy who is locked up and acts like a dog. The irony is the boy will become Adam's salvation and resurrect his humanity lost long ago.

The subject matter is sure to repel many people and because it is a highly artsy type of film that requires viewers to play intellectual/literary gymnastics with the continuously changing tone of the film and recognizing irony, metaphors, and symbols. Black comedy, the Holocaust, Jewish guilt, mental illness, and sexual perversion are all woven tightly together and they alternate freely in sharing the focus of any particular scene. The novel was similar in that narrators appeared who were different from previous narrators in the without readers recognizing them as such. There is also not a whole lot of action and set changes. Schrader explained the difficulty understanding the film. Confounded viewers expected simple explanations for things instead of discovering something for themselves. However, this idea of using humor to survive is not new and has been filmed many times before, often to much better effect. Life Is Beautiful comes to mind.

Budget restraints are evident throughout the film with the black and white concentration camp flashbacks masking the modernity of the setting. Another area in which the low budget is evident is in the Euro-Israeli cast, although it does add an aura of authenticity. Besides the stars Goldblum, DaFoe and Jacobi, the rest of the cast is foreign including the brilliant Ayelet Zurer as Adam's (Goldblum) female interest Gina Grey. As in many lower budget films, the strengths are usually the dialog and acting. In the case of Adam Resurrected, it's mainly the acting of Goldblum and the terrific young boy playing his canine counterpart in the sanitarium: Tudor Rapiteanu. **1/2 of 4 stars.

Jeff Goldblum is Adam Stein, the Jewish Clown.

[Future-Movie-Director · 6/10 · 26 January 2012]

Jeff Goldblum plays a post-war Jew that spent time in a German Concentration Camp as the commandant's personal clown. Before the war Adam Stein was a stage clown with an amazing act that made everyone bust at their seams. But when Nazi's came to power, his show was abruptly ended and his family was sent to a concentration camp. While there, a Nazi Commandant, Played by Willem Dafoe, recognized him from seeing his show before and assures his safety if he will perform as his own personal clown. This however leads to many months of brutal torture that Adam is never able to forget. Years later, Adam is sent to a research center to help those who were mentally affected by their time in the German Holocaust. The research center peruses Adam to help a young boy that was abused in many of the same ways that Adam was in the CC. A decent independent film with a great performance from Jeff Goldblum. Not everyone's idea of a war film, but well made nevertheless.

Worth Watching

[jcbinok · 7/10 · 19 July 2018]

I wanted to like this movie more than ended up actually liking it. There was a lot of good stuff: the clinic in the desert for Holocaust survivors; Willem Dafoe's Nazi character; Jeff Goldblum; the hot nurse, etc. But, things just never clicked for me.

For one thing, the other patients at the clinic had that Island of Misfit Toys feel; each had some strange behavioral tick, like a Wes Anderson flick from the 90's. Also, much of the dialog was inaudible or indecipherable. Snippets of German and strange accents; hard to understand..

Also, if the clinic was for Holocaust survivors, and the year was 1961, why was there a young boy there? He wouldn't even have been born during WWII.

Anyway, this movie is still worth watching because at least it's different. I'll throw it in again someday, and who knows maybe I'll like it better the second time around...

I wanted to like it...

[borgolarici · 6/10 · 22 December 2021]

This movie is a perfect little contraption, as is the character of Adam, who has everything it takes to make himself loved (Goldblum's acting is fantastic). Despite this, I was not able to love this movie as much as I would have liked, maybe I found it to bed a little too self satisfied. It seems to me a recurring flaw in many cultured movies but I guess it also depends on personal sensitivity.

Compelling acting from Goldblum

[SnoopyStyle · 5/10 · 29 September 2014]

Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum) is a charming patient at a mental institution for Holocaust survivors in 1961 Israel. His doctor Nathan Gross (Derek Jacobi) is confounded. He is infatuated with nurse Gina Grey (Ayelet Zurer). He is haunted by dogs and starts to hallucinate. He finds a boy acting like a dog under his bed. Before the war, Adam was a magician, all-around entertainer. He was liked by everybody including the Nazis until he was put into a concentration camp. The camp was run by Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe) who recognized him. Adam survived by playing the part of the Commandant's "dog" while his family is killed off.

There is an interesting performance from Jeff Goldblum. However everything else is done with such lifelessness. Both the asylum and the concentration camp are locations of absurd lunacy. There is a rambling nature to the story. It is almost Kafkaesque. I wonder if there is too much time at the asylum. At its core, this must be a battle between Adam and Commandant Klein rather than Adam and the boy. The problem is that the movie spends too little time with Klein.

A story about survivor's guilt

[ZenShark · 9/10 · 6 August 2009]

I am surprised at the hatefully negative reviews this movie has gotten. But then I suppose anything that handles a truly dark subject matter, and doesn't spoon feed the audience doesn't get much praise.

This movie is excellent with excellent performances. I didn't mind the accent because it doesn't matter. The meaning of the movie, and the metaphors of film employed are brilliant.

The movie details the struggle of a former circus performer and celebrity with his guilt over surviving his family in the holocaust. Goldblum portrays a man who finds insanity more comfortable then sanity, because sanity brings with it sad truths.

Fine talents wasted

[Nozz · 26 February 2013]

Not only some deservedly big international actors but also some local favorites from Israel do their best with a script that can scarcely scrape together a brief, weak thread of interest. The movie is based on a book by Yoram Kaniuk, who was also the author of HIMMO, KING OF JERUSALEM. Both stories are about hospitalized men. Evidently Kaniuk identifies with a fantasy protagonist who, by way of great suffering, achieves a martyrdom that returns him to a state of babyhood where he has no responsibilities but is the center of attention and is doted on by a beautiful lady in white. Not a healthy fantasy, but it's not the basic problem of the movie. The basic problem is that the incidents are insistently arbitrary. The hero is at first dependent on a Nazi whose whims are arbitrary. Then he becomes insane, so that his own behavior is arbitrary. Then he's put in a hospital where the rules, as far as the audience can tell, are arbitrary-- restrictive one moment, permissive the next. Unlike the patients in HIMMO, the surrounding patients here are ciphers; they are astoundingly well disciplined, always keeping quiet so that Adam can express himself at will. They restrict their personalities to a single quirk apiece and none of them presents any conflict that could drive a story-- except the boy who behaves like a dog. He presents an opportunity for Adam to redeem himself by helping someone who is in a way his mirror image, and thank goodness for this one escape from the arbitrary succession of dramatic but directionless incidents. Unfortunately it occupies only a little of the movie and is far too sketchy. A dream cast, a fine composer, good visuals-- all wasted.

The novel's original title: "Adam, Son of Dog"

[bobdobbs888 · 6/10 · 24 August 2012]

Paul Schrader graduates into the "you can mix anything with anything" school of film making and does it with a national treasure in Israel. An Israeli/German/American production, Jeff Goldblum gives his best performance as a Geman-Jew performer/magician who goes through the 3rd Reich syndrome of modern imagined hells in order to describe a loving relationship between two humans lost in the performance/performer confusion. Schrader's strict Calvinist upbringing has always had him swimming deep into deepness and here he's once again in his element. He goes into detail on the commentary about his new thing in directing going from Hollywood classicism to the "anything goes" of today's transcendence into free-style mixing coming out of the electronic music revolution of the '90s. He talks about this at the following times on the commentary: 37:16—43:15, 45:50—48:52, 49:49—59:02, and 1:21:18— 1:24:09. Adapted from Yoram Kaniuk's '70s novel, Schrader needed to 'get hip' to have a chance with this creative masterwork. So did Goldblum who is working against his own past gestalt of clowning and goofing. Here he ironically can utilise a lot of this schtick; and he outdoes himself actually acting as good as he 'teaches' in LA (to get lots of legendary ass). Not a masterpiece, but ably offers a real adaptation of a very complex novel, a very rare accomplishment as Schrader talks about in the commentary and panel discussion. Fossilized Hollywood gets real stupid regarding 'translating' since they think they will miss the original product and lose the magical 'free' $. Art is actually required. Schrader is an honorary Jew and very similar in personality. Looking forward to the second half of his amazing career.

A self-serious bore, and another Holocaust film we just didn't need

[zetes · 4/10 · 22 November 2009]

Jeff Goldblum plays a Jewish clown who survives the Holocaust by pretending to be Nazi officer Willem Dafoe's dog. Sounds like a tasteless, cheesy Italian movie from the '70s, right? Oh, if only. This cringe-worthy material could have been magic, an easy-made cult classic. Unfortunately, Paul Schraeder directs. I'm sure he's directed a few good films. I've seen one or two okay ones. But he's so boring. He's so literal-minded and unambitious. Adam Resurrected is a first rate bore. Goldblum and Dafoe try to make it "fun", but Schraeder's only interested in making a dire Holocaust picture. We just don't need another one of those. For the record, the Holocaust plot line is really only the flashback sequences. The present-day sequences (set in 1960s Tel Aviv) have Goldblum in a mental hospital, complete with the ultra-lame mental hospital clichés (one woman thinks she's holding up the sky from falling - how wonderful!). He is "resurrected" when he finds a young boy who was raised as a dog and he attempts to cure him.

TIFF 08: Everyone likes the circus Adam Resurrected

[jaredmobarak · 8/10 · 15 September 2008]

It all begins rather straight-forwardly. Stein was a clown and stage performer in Berlin, a man without politics, working with his wife and children to bring joy to those who attended his shows. Through flashbacks we see how his audience slowly becomes more and more Nazi, going from one stray soldier with swastika to a barroom full of military. He is eventually told he can no longer perform and, being Jewish, it is only a matter of time before he and his kin are placed on a train out of the ghetto and into a camp. Back in the present, however, his affable nature and overabundance of intelligence show a seemingly well-adjusted man, one the patients relate to, the doctors rely on to bridge the gap between them and the survivors, and who has seduced the head nurse, a woman half his age, into an affair that the head doctor knows about and turns the other way. You see Dr. Nathan Gross (Derek Jacobi) feels he can help Stein, knowing that there is something buried deep down inside him, a guilt we can only assume stems from the fact that his family is nowhere to be seen. It appears he has survived while the rest disappeared. Only by giving him some freedom and trust can he begin to try and help.

Stein uses his charm and charisma, that which made him such a success on the stage in Germany, to become the favorite of all—laughing with the patients, not at them; engaging in his love affair with Ayelet Zurer's Nurse Grey; partaking in his secret stash of alcohol hidden away in every vent around the building; and just making the most of his stay, as though it's all a vacation. That is until one morning when he hears a distant barking. Discovering there is a dog in the hospital—something he was promised from day one would never occur—he begins to seek it out. Finally stumbling across the room with the animal, he gets down on all fours and turns into a canine himself. Barking, drooling, lashing out at the staff, Stein is not as put together as we had once thought.

This all now leads to the true nature of the film. I believe it is the most original tale of WWII and the Holocaust that I have seen. While most these days focus on the camps and the battles and how much they affect those involved at the present, Adam Resurrected shows us the long-lasting ramifications being treated as an inferior, as an animal, that the experience had. The film is all about the psychological scarring the war left on these survivors, from the abuse, the torture, the separation from loved ones, and even the fact that they are alive while so many are not. One may call Adam Stein a lucky man for the series of events that transpired to him. Lucky that he was seen by a man for whom he read the mind of during one of his acts in Germany, a Commandant played by Willem Dafoe who took Stein under his wing to make him laugh and forget about the horrible things he was doing; lucky that all he had to do was pretend to be a dog, doing tricks for his master while all the other Jews worked outside biding their time until death. Only when you see the toying that went on, Stein desperately attempting to save his family, doing everything he is asked for by this man he saved from committing suicide not long ago, do you see how much easier it would have been if he had just been killed.

Goldblum's Stein is a tour de force, a performance he spent a year researching and preparing for. This broken man has all his armor stripped away by the barking of some thing hidden under a sheet in a room. It is either a dog or maybe someone like him, someone degraded so much that he has become an animal in appearance as well as in spirit. Goldblum plays the magician to perfection, his quirkiness lending itself to the clownish way he goes about his life, but portrays the tortured soul to great effect too; a man able to control his own body, making it bleed, making it get sick, destroying himself over and over again as he does his best to help those around him, not yet in a healthy enough state to help himself. Utterly believable and completely transformed in his character, Adam Stein is whom we see on screen. A Holocaust survivor only starting to overcome the pain and sorrow inflicted upon him during the war and after, a man coming to grips with the fact that his name is not Stein but the number burned into his arm.

I credit Schrader for directing a stellar film, allowing Goldblum to really perform his heart out for the duration, a time span for which he is in frame almost 100% of the time. The attention to detail is impeccable, right down to the toy train at the hospital, a locomotive that gets under Stein's skin, perhaps a little too much until we are shown the flashback to the train that transported the Jews, both exact replicas of each other, making that toy a symbol of his incarceration. Adam Resurrected is truly a story of his journey to find salvation, for himself and those around him. A great line comes from a response to one man's quest for God as follows, "God is out to lunch. He left a note; it's on your arm." Maybe God abandoned them all as he sat back and watched the atrocities occur, but these people, the doctors, patients, and Stein especially, won't give themselves that luxury. They are there for the long run, doing their best to survive and cope with the fact that they still have the gift of life, hopefully with enough time to make something of it.

Adam Resurrected is a Disaster

[duncank-6 · 1/10 · 3 May 2009]

I am a huge fan of both dark movies and independent films. When I went to go see Adam Resurrected at the AFI Dallas film festival, I was confident I would love it. Although people had warned me not to go see the film, I simply assumed they couldn't appreciate good film or "art." Boy, was I wrong- I should have taken their advice.

Adam Resurrected is a complete joke. The performances are over-the-top and ridiculous, and the plot is- well- about a man in a mental institution who thinks he is a dog, who happens to mentor a young boy who ALSO thinks he's a dog .

The man had been forced to act like a dog to survive the Holocaust and is now haunted by his "dog" past.

This is not a joke.

Watching Jeff Goldblum walk around on all fours eating dog bones and trying to interpret it as "art" is utterly ridiculous. Watching him change the life of a young boy/dog was even more ridiculous. And of course, the movie is trying to be a "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", for all of the crazy mental patients seem to idolize Goldblum. The mental patients give unbelievably over-the-top performances, and the sex scenes involving Goldblum and the nurse (I will never forget his line when she gets on all fours for him and barks- "Less like a shnauzer, more like a wolf!") are truly horrendous.

This movie is pretentious and trying to be profound, yet it is actually a complete joke. It is incredibly disrespectful to any Holocaust survivors to portray a man forced to bark like a dog for a Nazi general as one of the hardships the Jews faced.

DON'T SEE THIS FILM.

When a movie is supported by 'Deutsche Filmförderung' or similar,

[imap-05232 · 1/10 · 31 January 2022]

Stay away!

Pseudo intellectual garbage, that could not be saved by the assembly of top-actors.

Nothing against making a movie about the Nazi terror that includes humoristic elements. Here, however, the attempt has tremendously failed.

Disgusting and tedious without any entertaining/exciting sequence. Again: Stay away!

Surreal Sleeper

[ween-3 · 9/10 · 31 January 2010]

Intriguing and surreal movie with an outstanding performance by Jeff Goldblum, whose name should have been in the mix for any number of acting awards for this film. Holocaust-related movies generally don't get deliver box office results, but this is a strikingly good treatment that deserves a wider audience. Watch it and get the word of mouth out there.

Paul Schrader, whose had a hand in more than a few films about human darkness, creates an intriguing film here. The "arms" scene at towards the end of the film is worth the price of admission on its own. Right up there with "I am Spartacus" or the "I'm still here, you bastards" last line from "Papillon". Powerful stuff. Derek Jacobi, Willem DeFoe, Ayelet Zurer, a frighteningly good Romanian kid named Tudor Rapiteanu, and the rest of international cast do yeoman's work.

Always been a fan of Jeff Goldblum's read on a line...and he's at the top of his game in "Adam".

Engrossing, disturbing, and unbelievable...

[JonathanWalford · 5/10 · 6 October 2010]

I was immediately taken in by this movie. Jeff Goldblum is excellent and the storyline is intriguing - at first. However, as the plot unfolds, the story becomes more and more unbelievable.

Jeff Goldblum plays a well known Jewish comic/psychic/magician in Berlin, who is being harassed as early as 1936 by the Nazis (extreme intimidation tactics like those depicted in the film don't really get underway until after Kristallnacht in November 1938.) He arrives in a camp in 1944 which seems particularly late for such a prominent Jewish citizen (the most well known Jews generally disappeared first, either through emigration or arrest.) Once interred, a peculiar relationship is created between the commandant and Jeff Goldblum who, as a prisoner, must act like a dog. He thinks this will save his family... It is difficult to believe he acted like a dog on a long term basis, but the reason this is introduced into the story is because fifteen years later he helps a boy who thinks he is a dog. This part of the story occurs in a psychiatric hospital for holocaust survivors. The boy who thinks he is a dog is about 11 years old, which means he was born well after the war and thus not a camp survivor, but this is never explained in the film.

It all reads like a plot taken from literature, which is exactly where it came from. The actors and director did an excellent job, some of the art direction (costuming, sets) was peculiar (what the hell were those boots the nurse wore!) but ultimately, you have to like an almost surreal plot line to appreciate this film. I am not a fan of this kind of literature - I prefer realism and films based on true stories. After all, truth is stranger than fiction.

A doomed masterpiece

[itamarscomix · 10/10 · 23 September 2011]

A masterpiece doomed to go unrecognized. Not too many people would like it or even sit through it, but in fact it's one of the best holocaust-related films ever made. Hateful reviews have commented on the fact that the film is disturbing and weird - or about the absurdity of a man surviving the holocaust by acting like a dog for the entertainment of a Nazi officer; is it any more absurd than the idea of people stamped with numbers or shoved into ovens? In the face of a horrifically absurd reality, insanity is often a valid option. Most WWII films center on the partisans, the heroes, the ones who kept their dignity and humanity in the face of genocide. But not everyone did. A major goal of Hitler's action was not just to destroy the Jews, but to dehumanize them first. And in many cases it worked. That's what this film is about - the loss of humanity, the feelings of guilt shared by the ones who survived at the expense of their own most basic human dignities, and it's small wonder that it's difficult for most to swallow.

Paul Schrader made a fantastic job adapting Yoram Kanyuk's novel; reviews blaming him of 'emotional detachment' miss the point that this detachment is very intentional. The cold and distant feeling experienced while watching it is very different from the pathos of Schindler's List or Life Is Beautiful, and, rather than draw the viewer into the actual events, brings them face to face with their very madness and incomprehensibility. Jeff Goldblum portrays that feeling perfectly in what may be the most powerful performance of his career - reminding me, at times, of Roy Scheider in All That Jazz. Master-character actors Willem Dafoe and Derek Jacobi compliment him perfectly without stealing the show, and some of Israel's biggest stars join in to complete the ensemble cast. Bottome line - a terrific film, and instantly a favorite of mine, but I hesitate to recommend it to anyone for fear of being blamed for it later. Watch it at your own risk, with an open mind, and with an empty stomach.

This movie is a joke

[RandyTheRam · 1/10 · 5 April 2009]

I went to Adam Resurrected expecting a holocaust movie, but what I got was a sick, weird, perverted film. This film had almost nothing to do with the holocaust. It followed a circus clown who, during the holocaust, was forced to act like a dog to avoid going to the camps. While this showed how brutal Nazis could be, I'm pretty sure this didn't even happen to ANYONE during the holocaust. This film is not art. Some have been saying the dog was "symbolism", but I don't care. This film was a piece of crap. Between his line (while having doggy style sex with his nurse...) "less like a schnauzer more like a wolf" and his line to the OTHER boy who thinks he's a dog (what are the chances of this?) "it's you and me against the world,", this dog themed holocaust movie was horrible. Should Jeff Goldblum get an Oscar? No. Unless they create a new category for "best human portraying a dog".

If this movie was based on a true story, might have a chance, but it's fiction and scary

[NaturaTek · 5/10 · 30 May 2009]

Jeff acting is great, like always. It's the whole theme of the movie, dark and just a little wacky at times, like getting turned on if the woman barks like a dog. I would totally understand if this movie was based on a true story and the movie is a interpretation of the book or something, but it's not. It's fiction story based on a holocaust survivor. Just makes you think what's going on inside of the head of these writers to write such a fictional event. Relating a human to a dog and getting turned on by watching a human bark like a dog. It maybe disturbing for some, and I see the reason why HowardStern found it disturbing as well.

Acting/performance is great, director shot is great. Just a shame so much talent and performance went into a fictional storyline that's a bit on the disturbing side.

Good Movie, Good Performance

[marksalerno1982 · 10/10 · 14 March 2009]

Jeff Goldlum does the best "Jeff Goldblum" in the business. If you hire him to do a "Jeff Goldblum" performance, it's like money in the bank. But _Adam Resurrected_ is not that. Goldblum's Adam is a nuanced, unpredictable and intelligent piece of work, the best of his career thus far. Indeed, the film as a whole represents a welcome return to adult themes and emotions. Sorrow, loss, power, human dignity, and human degradation are but some of the themes at work in Schrader's movie. Happily, we are not handed a tidy resolution (with the requisite "redemption" at the end), but a deep sense that life is a complicated, conflicted and layered experience. See this film when and if you get tired of CGI effects, Ben Stiller fart jokes and "the genius of Seth Rogen."

strange and stupid

[mentaer · 4/10 · 22 July 2009]

There you have at least two great actors who really give what they can but there's no director.

These two actors, Goldblum and Dafoe, are all alone in this insane brain sh... Nobody can explain them their purpose and so the audience is lost in this strange story which probably wants to make sense but there is no one who can press any sense and logic out of it.

It probably could have been a movie that is strange and disturbing and which make you think about humor and hope but sadly it's a movie which is strange, embarrassing and stupid.

There should have been a director, who is just as crazy as the story itself. I think Paul Schrader is a too boring person.

Fade to black 'Wow!'

[day_andy · 10/10 · 13 May 2009]

This is the best movie I have seen in a very long time. A completely intriguing script, with some really good acting. Jeff Golblum is playing a Jewish man and lands a powerful and extraordinary performance. Although he has faults at the beginning with the accent, he clearly improves during the movie. This is not a gruesome war movie. In fact, I didn't see one person murdered. It's a psychological drama that revolves around the tormented soul that Jeff Golblum portrays. A tragedy mixed with really dark humour that will keep your attention for the entirety of the film. It's rare that you see Hollywood actors doing such dark, confronting, art-house kind of movies, but this one works and I'm going to recommend it to lots of people.

Not a "Must See"...

[mefleischer · 6 November 2011]

I wanted this to be something it clearly could never live up to...."An entertaining film with great actors playing well written parts". So maybe it's the writing that let's it down or maybe it's the director that let it down but I have to say it's also some of the acting that lets it down. Interesting story line that in the right hands could have been something special. Simple things like Jeff Goldblum (whom I'm a fan of) speaking one moment with a German accent then a scene later without it is a tip off somethings not right here. Willem Dafoe as usual doesn't miss a beat and plays his part to a tee. In the end it not something you have to put on your list of things to see which is a shame because the story itself holds promise. It's frustrating watching movies that could have been, should have been and seeing them done like this. All that money and talent.

Disgusting

[pietclausen · 1/10 · 6 April 2021]

This film is probably considered intellectual art, but I found it disgusting and lunatic. I am sorry to have undergone this terror, but watch it I did. At least the terror ended at the end of the film and normality returned. I am not literal minded and cannot in fairness rate this movie.

An insult to those who suffered the holocaust

[nicholls_les · 1/10 · 17 June 2021]

What a load of nonsense, disturbing for all the wrong reasons. What was in he mind of whoever wrote this I do not know and I don't want to know. It is unusual for me not to watch a movie until the end but I could not watch all of this ridiculous story.