The Book Thief (Brian Percival, 2013)

Based on Markus Zusak's successful English-language novel, The Book Thief is another addition to the list of fictionalised accounts of the war from the perspective of ordinary, decent Germans, with an orphaned girl becoming absorbed by reading illicitly purloined books with the help of her adoptive father. It ticks off all the Oscar-targeting boxes with wanton Nazi thuggery, a saintly young Jewish man sheltered by the family and aspirations to make greater statements about the nature of life and liberty, but fails to connect largely due to a combination of false notes. One has to be the variety of takes on a German accent employed by the cast, with Emily Watson's Blackadder model in the role of the foster mother being truly grating, while the overall soft-soaping of the characters and events is also quite excessive, and then there's the frankly daft decision to retain the narrative voiceover of Death musing on human behaviour from the novel too, which is just a step too far down the road of tweeness.

4/10

Anthropoid (Sean Ellis, 2016)

Based on the true story of the assassination of senior Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 in Prague by Czech agents, Anthropoid is high on tension and locations and low on unpredictability. A host of British and Irish actors suffer under the weight of their random accents and dramatically flat mission, with a few personality quirks thrown in to give them something to play with until a bloodbath in the church where the killers may well have holed up, but through a perspective that is strictly of the Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare school as far as slaying hordes of zombie-like Wehrmacht goons goes. It may be useful for the ignorant as a lesson that the wartime resistance to the Nazis in occupied countries didn't only consist of the French, but other than that it's a pretty shallow exercise.

5/10