Review of Denial (2016) by Michael M — 21 Feb 2017

This is another one of those movies that I wouldn't really call an entertaining movie, but I'd venture to call it an important movie. It really was a bizarre experience watching it honestly, there were times when I was getting bored and started dozing off, but I kept forcing myself to stay awake because I was actually interested in what they were talking about.

The actors all do a fine job (and it's nice seeing Andrew Scott get more work outside of Sherlock) and the concept of someone defending history is damn intriguing, the problem is it plays out more like a lecture in a history course than it does a movie.

This story is worth telling, but if the filmmakers seem to rely on just the facts themselves to be enough to make up for pedestrian filmmaking. At that point though, you might as well just read a Wikipedia article about what happened.

I never felt the tension or importance of what they were doing. The tension and importance was there on a logical level, but not on an emotional level. For a movie that goes into the nuances of the holocaust, it is surprising how little emotion is in this story.

I could maybe see this working as something you show in a high school history class when covering this subject, and in that context it would work fine. It's worth hearing this story, I just wish there was a better movie to tell it.