Director Robert Schwentke shoots in black and white, yet the story is strictly black, giving little insight into the cruel, impressively coolheaded Herold (Max Hubacher) except that he's incensed at the German retreat.

| Mar 11, 2020

Hubacher's performance is a masterful physical feat.

| Oct 22, 2018

Captures the moment when fear and chaos bite and the ordered military existence crumbles into savagery and base urges.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 22, 2018

It's a profoundly disturbing film, full of striking images.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 21, 2018

You've heard of 'Stalag 17', now meet Stalag 666.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2018

What a chilling performance from Hubacher.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 19, 2018

Though he belabors the obvious and sensationalizes the carnage and sadism, Schwentke is dealing with some relevant issues.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 6, 2018

"The Captain" is full of suspense and interest throughout.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2018

Atrocities and showmanship are queasy bedfellows when making movies of this ilk.

| Aug 9, 2018

Schwentke isn't simply talking about the sins of Nazism. There's an immediate and visceral resonance to the idea that a uniform - the right uniform - is a license to inhumanity.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 9, 2018

Many of the flourishes come off as callow, superficial. You watch "The Captain" with a sick feeling in your stomach, but probably not sick enough.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 2, 2018

The movie seems at times a little too pleased with itself and its mordant observations on humanity.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 27, 2018

A brave and uncompromising indictment of human nature, Teutonic or otherwise.

| Jul 27, 2018

It compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.

| Jul 26, 2018

The Captain is a bleak film, but then again, these are bleak times.

| Original Score: B | Jul 26, 2018

In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 25, 2018

From the start, he marks the film with the two polar extremes on which the film is organized: fabricated authenticity and simplistic irony.

| Jul 25, 2018

We are left to contemplate this vision of Fascism as a machine that, once turned on, can sustain itself even in the absence of explicit direction from above.

| Jul 25, 2018

The central premise is arresting, as is the style, but there's a lot more that could have been done with it than just show how one ill-defined individual instantly opts to join his country's lowest form of life.

| Sep 21, 2017

A film that fully understands the psychology of the German soldiers and offers unflinching, timeless truth.

| Sep 11, 2017