Valkyrie

I promised myself that I would never suffer through another Tom Cruise movie. And I haven't, although I was a little anxious at the beginning.

Cruise can now claim to have acted next to Kenneth Brannaugh and not look like an idiot. But he chose a character well suited to his lack of dynamic emotional range as an actor and it suited him well. Cruise cruises on cold, composed determination with a dash of impatience and a dab of sentiment. The sentiment dries up and blows away within the first 15 minutes and so we are all OK to watch the plot to assassinate Hitler.

Valkyrie is a particularly stiff picture with a goodly number of old heads attending the plotting and conspiring. For all of the dramatic potential of such a flick it came down to bomb ticking tension and the nervous energy of deception behind protocol. Fortunately, there was a cast that did fear fairly well. 

These days I am succumbing to my share of WW2 obsession now into my fourth or fifth selection the subject in the form of The Hitler Book, which is an interesting volume compiled from confessions made under duress.

Anyway, I give the movie 82%