Exciting, Taut, High Tensioned Stuff

Rating: 8/10 (28 August 2015)

Give Tom Cruise credit for his performance in Valkyrie. There's no high energy soundtrack doing the work for him here, this is old fashioned high tension thriller acting, and Cruise does it quite well.
Hitler is still rampant even as the war has turned against Germany, and a reverse cabal of moderate and humanistic German officers think the war can end if Hitler is assassinated.
But how to reach Hitler in the midst of a blazingly militarized Germany during a two front war? This is the almost-impossible challenge the film's plot poses. If this ambitious hope can be grasped, Cruise's character, a still-young but old-souled combat hero, von Stauffenberg, might just be the man to grasp it.
Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson give career-polishing performances as German generals moving in and out of 'the plot' with varying degrees of self-interest.
The filmed scenes, which mostly stick to wartime Berlin barracks, look fact-perfect. The preponderance of grey woolen uniforms as costumes and unwieldy sounding German names (to American ears) are offset by crisp, well-paced dialogue, interesting lighting, and tension filled physical blocking of the actors as they go to work.