Defiance

"A potentially exceptional story is told in a flatly unexceptional manner."

"“Jews don’t fight!” mutters a Red Army soldier. “These Jews do!” says another admiringly. Great pitch, largely undone by stilted, solemn direction."

"Defiance presents itself as an explicit correction of the cultural record, a counterpoint to all those lachrymose World War II tales of helplessness and victimhood. This is a perfectly honorable intention, but the problem is that, in setting out to overturn historical stereotypes of Jewish passivity, Mr. Zwick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Clayton Frohman) ends up affirming them."

"The best performance, because it's more nuanced, is by Liev Schreiber. His Zus Bielski is more concerned with the big picture, more ideological, more driven by tactics."

"Interesting tale with good performances but lacks emotional punch."

"At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, I say again, a tighter edit with half an hour less in the cinema, and this film would have been a far more memorable one."

"Defiance has some genuine strengths but also some weaker elements, and these opposing traits battle it out kind of the way the contentious Bielskis fought not only the Germans but each other."

"That butting of heads, as performed by actors as strong and soulful as Craig and Schreiber, lends Defiance an emotional charge, even as the film itself struggles dramatically to find its way out of those woods."

"An amazing true tale is somewhat diminished by second-hand storytelling: entirely admirable, largely entertaining, and yet curiously hollow."