| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 16, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 16, 2011

Schreiber and Craig make a well-matched pair of bulls. Schreiber's volatility is a nice foil to the taciturn intelligence that makes Craig such a great Bond.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 8, 2009

Zwick's limitations as an action director seem linked to a troubled conscience: he seems conscious of a need to entertain, but worried that his audience will take too much pleasure in the spectacle of vengeance.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 1, 2009

As a piece of historical redress, a great service has been done in bringing this narrative to the screen.

| Original Score: B | Jan 16, 2009

It's understandable and laudable that they desire not to sensationalize the Bielskis, and they've made a worthy film. But their understated approach makes the struggle seem less urgent than it must surely have been.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 16, 2009

Ultimately, the film celebrates and memorializes the survival of something unthinkable, and a group of people for whom defiance meant, at heart, that they would push against the growing darkness and carry on.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 16, 2009

It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to make a gripping 137-minute epic about people standing around under the trees.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 16, 2009

It is, all in all, a film as square-shouldered as its leads -- tough-minded, forcibly acted and conventionally spun by Zwick and co-writer Clayton Frohman.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 16, 2009

What is puzzling is how Edward Zwick has taken an extraordinary real-life story about a handful of people who defied huge odds, and turned it into an utterly conventional war movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 16, 2009

The story is inspirational; the movie isn't.

| Original Score: C | Jan 16, 2009

Zwick, intent on correcting the perception of Jews as passive victims, lets the action set pieces overwhelm the more intimate scenes, several of which are already diminished by stilted dialogue.

| Jan 16, 2009

What the Bielski brothers did in the forests of Belorussia deserves to be remembered and celebrated, but this glossy studio production robs them of life. It's not just new Holocaust stories that we need, but new ways of telling them.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 16, 2009

The story, in other words, is pure Hollywood gold, full of opportunities for stirring speeches, ethical quandaries, lessons about tolerance and humanity, and violence against Nazis.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 16, 2009

Flat and dull, only mildly redeemed by two strong lead performances and the inherent power of its subject matter.

| Jan 16, 2009

For all its teary, heartfelt melodrama and bloodily chaotic machine gun fury there is very little here to hold on to, and while sitting through all 137-minutes is hardly a chore it's not like doing so has done me any favors.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 16, 2009

The script hokes up the tensions between the brothers played by Craig and Schreiber, and while they're both fascinating, simmering-kettle performers, they consistently outshine their material.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 16, 2009

The natural world of the forest is for the escapees a sort of Arden where many things are turned upside down.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 15, 2009

Craig and Schreiber are terrific as the slightly thuggish Bielskis, and they're joined by an able supporting cast that includes Jamie Bell and the wonderful Mia Wasikowska.

Full Review | Jan 15, 2009

Defiance is a wobbly stool, a seat propped up by the uneven legs of ethics debate, Holocaust movie and action thriller. Still, the fascination and novelty of Nazi-killing Jews who don't perish in the death camps packs quite the wallop.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 15, 2009