SteinMo What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

cinemajesty Movie Review: "Defiance" (2008)Just rebounding from a highly-agile as face-pacing James Bond productions 22 "Quantum of Solace", leading actor Daniel Craig carries together with fellow Liev Schreiber this differentiated World-War-2 action drama, concerning Polish Jews fleeing their Belarus ghetto neighborhood from invading National socialist-oppressors into the woods of Eastern Europe, when "Glory" (1989) director Edward Zwick stumbles over some inconvenient real-event thriller facts of left out local war crimson massacres by ing forces with overly-committed soviet partisans.Here must "Defiance" fight to stay relevant in retrospective, when professionally-shot machine-gun-action cinematography by highly-talented lighting cameraman Eduardo Serra, also responsible for shooting "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" in season 2010/2011. The Editorial in roller-coasting lengthy 130 Minutes becomes a stony age in overall-depressive décor, when even young and capable ing characters played by Alexa Davalos, Jamie Bell and Mia Wasikowska can hardly spark the so-needed instant classic feature for WW2-story emotional injections that this Edward Zwick directed movie stays behind preceding, far superior "Last Samurai" (2003) expectations at initial viewings.© 2018 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

denis888 It seemed to be an excellent idea to make a WWII movie, set in Belarus in 1941-1945, showing the (in)famous Belski Brothers, who were Jews making their partisan camp and fighting against the oppressors. The problems stated immediately when I saw the casting. Don't get me wrong, Liev Screiber is a great choice, but Daniel Craig was clearly wrong. He is again a James Bond character, cool and defiant (Pun intended), but he lacks depth and is not convincing as a Jew. The rest of the casting is rather bland and bleak, so you will hardly anybody there. The second problem is the historic accuracy. I will not dwell onto details, but in reality that was not so simple as in the movie, as The Belskis fought not just Germans. The reality was much more convoluted, complicated and mixed. The third and really puzzling aspect is - why on earth do they speak a very weird mixture of typically simplified and wronged English and suddenly in Russia. I am Russian, and I was almost jumping on my chair hearing these sudden jumps from broken English to quite clean Russian. Liev speaks Russian better, by the way. Then the battle scenes - well, this shaky camera, these typical explosions, these bullets fatty zing-zanging onto soil - all of that is so ...wel.. Hollywood. The whole battle thing here is so hasty, kinky and wry that it leaves a feeling of utter disbelief. The overall impression - no, this is not your ultimate war movie. It leaves you cold and never lets the feeling of artificial setting go away. My rating - 2.

Tanay Chaudhari Year 1941; World War-II at its height. The Nazis invaded Belarus and swept entire towns of Jews - liquidating and deporting many to concentration camps. "Freedom" was reduced to shreds; yet to reattain, it all began with the act of Defiance Recently orphaned in the carnage, the four Beilski brothers took refuge in the forests; only to know that hundreds like them, were scattered all over. The eldest two - Tuvia and Zus - soon realised that a more concrete settlement would be needed, citing the increasing numbers of their exiles. Makeshift huts came up first, followed by those sneaky "food missions". Thus, those stranded ones grew into an armed brigade ("otriad"). A "communally-functioning-camp", individuals worked for the survival of all while living with the strict rationing in food, medicines, clothes, and even reproduction. Their lives constantly at threat of being caught or killed-in-action, didn't stop the Beilski Otriad to the resistant Soviet Red Army against the Third Reich.When Jews were considered best at surrendering and dying, that frail clique resisted by living. Moses didn't, but they themselves hand- in-hand parted their waters, with "courage as their ultimate weapon".Good casting choices of Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and the ensemble, to enact a lesser known sequence of events in this biographical-war-drama by Edward Zwick ("Blood Diamonds"), amidst his signature action-choreography and Oscar nominated civil-scoring by James Newton Howard ("The Hunger Games") makes it a fair watch for anyone interested in a different side of history. Rating - 7/10.

Leonard Kniffel There is no limit to my interest in films about World War II, so I am not sure how an interesting movie like Defiance did not catch my attention until eight years after it was made. The film succeeds on many levels in its effort to dispel the notion that all the murdered Jews of Europe went to their deaths without a fight. By dramatizing the true story of the four Bielski brothers and the formation of their community of partisans, Defiance pays tribute at last to this successful effort that saved 1,236 men, women, and children from the Nazi death camps and sent a significant number of their persecutors to their own deaths. For me, the problem with this movie is its handling of history, namely the complete omission of Poland from the narrative. You can almost hear director Edward Zwick trying to untangle the complicated net of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and political loyalties that ripped Poland to shreds as and Russia plotted to divide the nation and exterminate any people who did not fit into their plan for world domination. Zwick's solution? Leave Poland out of the film entirely. The problem with this simplified rendition of history is that it is simply wrong. The Bielski family were Polish Jews. The community the real brothers built in the forests was in the vicinity of Nowogródek in a portion of German-occupied Poland that was annexed by the Soviet Union and made part of Belarus after the war.Of course, this is not a documentary film, any more than Shakespeare's history plays are documentaries. Defiance is based on a true story, but it is a fictionalized , featuring outstanding performances by Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber. Not a word of Polish is spoken by anyone in the film, which features dialogue in English, Russian, and German.For historical s, better to read two recent English-language books about the Bielski partisans: Defiance (1993) by Nechama Tec and The Bielski Brothers (2004) by Peter Duffy. A book (2009) in Polish by two reporters from Gazeta Wyborcza, Odwet: Prawdziwa historia braci Bielskich (Revenge: The True Story of the Bielski Brothers) focuses on the political and historical context in which the partisans operated, specifically the fighting between Polish and Soviet resistance groups in the Kresy (former Eastern Poland) region.