Germany's entry for 2005 Best Foreign Film Oscar has been picking up plaudits around the festival circuit and picking up controversy as well, mainly of the ignorant variety, namely from those thinking they know what it's about. The finished article is somewhat different.

The film concerns the downfall of the Third Reich, when those who remained of the Nazi hierarchy retired to Hitler's bunker, as Russian troops entered Berlin. In fact, it begins very much earlier, since it is partly based on the writings of Traudl Junge, a young secretary who worked for the Fuhrer, but soon moves to the final stages as the script also takes as its source an account by Joachim Fest, called Inside Hitler's Bunker.

The film has been accused of being sympathetic to the Nazi leader and yet to suggest that Oliver Hirschiegel's depiction gives genocidal murderers humanity is to miss the essential point that this is precisely why so many were taken in. The regime did have plausibility on its side, a better future for the German race, and they're preaching to the converted in the bunker. What is fascinating is to watch how the idyll crumbles around them and there are chilling portrayals of the Goebbels (Joseph and his wife Magda), right-hand man Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, architect Albert Speer and many of Hitler's generals.

Personally, I found it riveting from the word go, watching the idealism, the megalomania, the ruthlessness, the plotting by what essentially was a bunch of gangsters with a great deal of misused power. Goebbels's children have to be done away with in a chilling scene and you end up thinking what heartless parents and yet remember that by dying in comfort they had it easy compared to the thousands of children gassed in the camps.

Bruno Ganz is simply brilliant as Hitler, complete with mannerisms (the flickering hand), the ability to be a charmer to secretaries one minute and issue a volley of abuse to his generals the next. Julianne Kohler is excellent as Eva Braun, blinkered, loyal and totally devoted to Adolf. Also, I liked Heino Ferch as the level-headed Speer, Ulrich Matthes as a chillingly obstinate Goebbels and Ulrich Noethen as the deviant, but highly intelligent, Himmler.

The weaknesses in the film are minor. One might have liked to see more from the years when the Final Solution was taking place. Secondly, Speer's character is not quite right, according to his living relatives, and dramatic licence has been taken at the end where the outcome of secretary Junge was different in real life than is depicted here. Then there are the Russians. They were particularly brutal in their treatment of Berliners, but the impression given in the film is that they were a pleasant bunch, quite different to the well-documented viciousness they exhibited at the time.

Otherwise, this is an admirable portrayal of a part of the war seldom covered in previous films. Much of the fascination is to find out what occupied the minds of these flawed human beings that made them capable of committing such atrocities and Downfall goes some way to explaining this. Ganz's rounded portrayal of the idealistic dictator sticks in the mind and part of understanding the horror is to recognise the calculated deviousness behind it.