Good: Critic Reviews

Good has a stagy fustiness, but it's worth seeing for Mortensen, who makes this study of 
 a 'good German' look creepily contemporary. He shows us the horror 
 of ignorance.

Good is an anemic screen adaptation of C. P. Taylor's play about a respectable 'good German' who passively acquiesces to Hitler's agenda.

To its credit, Good is at least a piece with something serious to say, with little of the meretricious responsibility-deflecting that The Reader dealt in.

Though the film opens with an intriguing burnished look, it bogs down about halfway through with talkiness and uneven pacing. When reality finally dawns on Halder, it is not only too late for him to redeem himself, but too late for the audience to care.

A really terrible movie based on what I imagine was a far more interesting 1981 play.

We know just what each character will do, and exactly where each path will lead. And we're never wrong.

The subject -- self-deception and failure of nerve in an unjust world -- is too messy and horrible to laugh away.

The often impressive Mortensen can't make Halder much more than a stereotypical academic milquetoast. Other perfs come off just adequate, though not for lack of effort.

The banality of evil has met its match in the banality of Good, a Holocaust parable that barely registers a pulse.

Bears a superficial resemblance to "The Conformist" and "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," with their sense of dreary complacency, oppressively museum-like spaces, and curiously drab natural settings, but ultimately "Good" is less evocative

Viggo Mortensen looks the part but never brings it home with great conviction or passion. I never believed in the character and that greatly diminished the film's ability to argue its ethical case.

Absorbing drama about a good man who is blind to the horrors of Germany's Nazi regime.

Morally speaking, everything about Good is tidily correct. But it is more a predictable parable than a full-fledged narrative.

To those who wonder if we really need Hollywood to give us more Holocaust stories, I would argue yes, just better ones than we get with Good.

A tale illustrating the banality of evil is as timely as ever but the execution is heavy-handed and even with location filming and elaborate sets it still feels very theatrical.

It may have been a good stage play: people say it was. But its author, the late C.P. Taylor, was not around to stop it becoming a lousy film.

Not for the first time, great theatre makes for a merely adequate film.

We're gearing up for a clunker of a climax involving musically gifted interns at the world's sprucest concentration camp. Mortensen wears it well, but this feels like very old hat.

The point is how does a "good" man get seduced by evil? Thing is, the movie's so muted and keeps viewers at such arm's length, you cease to wonder.

Ultimately Good, like its central figure, seems to lack the courage of its convictions.

Good's attempts to diagnose the cancerous spread of Nazi influence through Germany's population in the mid-'30s is laudable, but despite Mortensen's stoic talents Halder is just too hollow a character for this to be anything other than a vapid parable.

By all accounts, Taylor's play was a more experimental piece than this film, in which the production values, like the acting, veer between the acceptable and the stodgy.

It's a thought-provoking theme, which is rather let down by a thoroughly unconvincingly turn from Mortensen.

It is a fine piece of acting from Mortensen, who portrays his character's weakness superbly. But Good sometimes lacks pace and direction. On balance this is an intelligent and sensitive approach to a very dark era of history.