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 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

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

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

Set in that weird film version of Nazi Germany full of RADA-trained Home Counties poshos, Good is, in a sense, an amazing achievement- it makes the Holocaust boring.

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

Mortensen ably carries most of the weight, with a minimalist performance.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 10, 2009

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

| Jan 20, 2009

Good contributes very little to a conundrum that has occupied historians and psychologists for half a century.

| Original Score: C | Jan 16, 2009

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.

| Original Score: B | Jan 14, 2009

It's a powerful film on its own merits, but it also points out how tame and impotent The Reader is in examining similar issues.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 2, 2009

It definitely wouldn't have done anyone involved with Good any harm to ask what relevance heavy-handed history plays have to do with the world of today.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Dec 31, 2008

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

| Dec 31, 2008

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

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 31, 2008

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

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 31, 2008