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Reviews Counted:36
Fresh:24
Rotten:12
Average Rating:6.4/10
Consensus: Despite a degree of predictability and cliches, the high production values and sincere performances by the leads elevate this coming-of-age story set in Nazi Germany.
While the background of the story is fascinating and enlightening, the foreground story could be more complex and original. The plot is a good story whose arc is a little overly familiar. Still the production values are high and the story is compelling.
Unfortunately, the more 'realistic' the film seems, the less pleasant it is to watch.
The movie's own moral stance is above reproach, and the two leads are engaged enough to make you care about the outcome.
Top CriticThis well-made World War II film from Germany is both a coming-of-age story and a critique of National Socialist ideology.
Bankrupt fascist politics and a talent in the ring combine to force decisions no teenager should have to make.
Before The Fall packs a wallop, even if the ending is sentimentalized - the impact is more a jab than a right hook.
A subtle portrait of the Nazi education system
It's a handsomely mounted production that benefits greatly from location shooting and sharp attention to historical detail.
The acting is believable; the photography, atmospheric; and the moral, unmistakable.
Nazis were once innocent children -- that, at least, is the notion behind Dennis Gansel's overcooked wartime drama about the ill-fated friendship between two teenage boys at a training school for elite German military recruits.
Top CriticThe Nazis were bad and evil. Is everyone clear on that? Good, because German filmmakers are finally taking a stab at the touchy subject of the Third Reich, with varying degrees of success.
Though well-made, Before the Fall never really comes to cinematic life.
I guarantee you nothing this cheesy happened during World War I.
Set in Berlin in 1942, Dennis Gansel's intensely beautiful film brings us inside Hitler's network of elite schools to groom young Germans for positions of power.
Top CriticA convincing German morality play about the Nazi's amoral worship of strength and power.
We get tepid moralizing on dehumanization in the military.
Top Critic[T]o borrow from Pauline Kael’s glowing review of The Conformist, this feature isn’t “so much a reconstruction of the past as [it is] an infusion from it.”
Unobtrusive, tasteful direction and music, along with retro-dark photography and a quietly good cast, keep this film above may others of its ilk.
A polished, German-tinged Dead Poets Society with budding SS automatons subbing in for privileged Vermont WASPs.
Gansel crafts story and characters to show us a rare but possible youth of Nazi Germany whose inborn morality is not subject to "training.
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