Downfall Review

Bernd Eichinger's script draws on Joachim Fest's history of the bunker and on the memoir of Traudl Junge, the young secretary Hitler hired in 1942, and it keeps her at the edge of most scenes as a witness. From Hitler's 56th birthday, with Soviet shells already landing on Berlin, the film counts down to the end in a concrete warren of generals delivering bad news to a man moving armies that no longer exist.

Bruno Ganz spent four months with a secret 1942 recording of Hitler talking to Marshal Mannerheim to catch his conversational voice and Austrian accent, and he plays the tremor of a man he believed had Parkinson's disease. The map room tirade, the scene the internet has spent two decades subtitling, is only the loudest moment. The worst are quiet: Hitler's courtesy to his secretaries, and Corinna Harfouch's Magda Goebbels putting her six children to bed for the last time.

German critics argued over whether a Hitler this human was a Hitler this safe, and Wim Wenders complained that the film lacked a point of view. It is episodic by design, a procession of suicides rather than a story, but the real Junge's closing words, admitting she failed to recognise the monster in time, supply the argument.