Even if Good isn't great, it remains a chilling cautionary tale.

| Nov 21, 2020

... unfortunately in the end and the adjective "good" does not sit well with this film. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 20, 2018

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

| Aug 8, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 21, 2009

Good isn't great. The film has a quality cast who turn in fine performances in a movie that aims to be profound but isn't.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 21, 2009

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

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 17, 2009

A strong cast and good starting material doesn't manage to save this unsuccessful adaptation.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 17, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 3/6 | Apr 17, 2009

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

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 17, 2009

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

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 17, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 17, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 17, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 17, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 17, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 17, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 17, 2009

Mortensen isn't bad, though he looks merely absent-minded rather than anguished.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 17, 2009

There are gripping moments of tough, muscular moral tension, mainly when Isaacs steps in, but these are dissipated by occasionally cringeworthy dialogue and a limply executed bourgeois subtext.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 17, 2009

The original play, once dubbed one of the 100 best of the century, is fleshed out with skill by Amorim but somehow his film never comes fully to life. Even its melodramatic ending falls flat.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 17, 2009

Despite strong performances and decent production design, Good lacks the emotional weight it needs to deliver the requisite punch. Disappointing.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 17, 2009