nilent

The Survivor is not an easy movie to watch. If you are in search of light easy distractive simplistic entertainment this film will not be your "cup of tea". If you have the courage, intellectual, emotional and, spiritual capacity to bear witnesss to a great, heart rendering story that casts light on the best and the worst of what it means to be human, then you will not regret the small amount of your time spent with this riveting story. The script is based on the actual life experience of Harry Haft who survived escaped death in Auschwitz by making impossible choices to engage in what amounted to death matches with his fellow death camp prisoners. This is a true to life tale of the most profound and horrifc forms of moral ambiguity imaginable. The whole cast does an excellent job of portraying their respective characters, but the sheer acting chops and physical dedication that Ben Foster displayed in the making of The Survivor shall surely, in my view, earn him both a Oscar nomination and the award for best actor.

Giving it 9 stars as good basic old western style entertainment. If this had come out 40 years ago it would likely have been considered a classic. Obviously some are judging the movie harshly based on some kind of modern film school doctrines. The movie is classical low budget fare and that's just fine. It delivers what is expected with strong performances across the board. Perhaps I would feel differently had I paid fifteen bucks at a theater...but as a streaming film on Showtime, Dead for a Dollar is golden bargain to be appreciated if not treasured...and yes, it's something of a morality tale in which some degree of justice is realized, along with strongly implicit anti-racist and anti-sexist messaging.

Love to pick at nits. Yes the movie takes some liberties with absolute historical accuracy. This is clearly a somewhat hollywoodized dramatization of one set of events in a long life. There is nothing new about that...in fact it is routine.

Tubman surely wasn't the perfect absolutely saintly being portrayed here...she was human. But the broad outline of the story is true...in my view, you have to be something of a jerk to be so harshly strongly motivated to trash it...and "jerk" is the most charitable interpretation of hating on this movie.

My sense is that there are some people who are stone cold people who, obviously can't demean the movie directly...but who come here and use what sounds like legitimate movie criticism criteria to simply throw negativity into the picture and to try to prevent people from going to see the movie. Obviously not all of the bad reviews are from stone, but I suspect a significant number of them are.

We saw this last night and people were crying. I shed tears myself. At the end there was applause and many stayed in their seats through the credits. Again, the movie works.

I suggest that this should be used in schools as one element in a curriculum of instilling values into kids. The ideal of "give me liberty or give me death" is a key to whatever it is that can indeed make America great. It's LITERALLY a shame that our "Founding Fathers" did not universally apply that valuation of human life to ALL people, not just white, property owning males.