A very well made movie!

Rating: 8/10 (10 September 2007)

The writer director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck has done a very competent job on this movie, everything seems to work and there was nothing badly done to jar you out of the reality of the story. The acting is deeply believable, the settings and situations all work and there is no sense that any scene has been needlessly add to satisfy some commercial demand or that any scene has been left out or fudged because of budget limits or problems with shooting schedules.
This competence is important because this movie could easily lose the audience if it flubbed things even a little or at least it could have lost me. It didn't though, it held my attention and I became engrossed in the lives of these characters.
Simple scenes take on new meaning because of the way they are interlaced, those of the observer and the observed. You know these people are being watched because powerful people are looking for an excuse to hurt them for petty selfish reasons or advance their careers.
This movie is a masterpiece of competent film making, a simple story told with the utmost attention to detail.