Movie critic William Arnold: “The movie works like clock”, “Valkyrie” is a highly intelligent and deeply engrossing historical drama and, frame for frame, the year’s most suspenseful nail-biter.”
He has nothing but praise for script writer McQuarrie, director Singer and Tom’s performance and ends his review with this comment about the whole cast: “they all seem Oscar-worthy.”

Read the review here:

On paper, the World War II drama “Valkyrie” — which teams Tom Cruise with the “Usual Suspects” duo of writer Christopher McQuarrie and director Bryan Singer in a true story about a German plot to assassinate Hitler — is the Christmas movie season’s most risky venture, because:

It asks us to accept the still-boyish, all-American movie star in a role that seems well beyond his range and competence: that of an aristocratic, old school, German Army colonel.

It asks us to forget what we’ve been taught by the last 60-odd years of Hollywood moviemaking about German war guilt and accept an alternate reality that there was a vast internal resistance to the Nazis.

It asks us to feel dramatic tension over two hours for a story of which we know the outcome: Hitler was not assassinated and thus the movie’s conspiracy did not succeed.

And yet, despite these handicaps, the movie works like a clock. A few minor quibbles aside (the casting of Hitler, for instance), “Valkyrie” is a highly intelligent and deeply engrossing historical drama and, frame for frame, the year’s most suspenseful nail-biter.

The story opens in 1943 as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg — who, like much of the regular German army, has long been disenchanted with Hitler — is severely wounded in the North African campaign, losing an eye, his right hand and several fingers of his left hand.

While recovering in Berlin, he’s gradually drawn into the anti-Nazi underground, which already has made several unsuccessful attempts on the Fuhrer’s life; and, in its service, he soon will hatch an even more ambitious effort to assassinate the leader by planting a bomb in one of his high-level strategy sessions.

But knowing Hitler’s death will not destroy the Nazi monster, his larger goal — and the source of the movie’s most intense drama — is a complex scheme to manipulate one of the Nazi’s own fail-safe plans, Project Valkyrie, to neutralize the elite SS force loyal to Hitler, and bring down the entire leadership hierarchy of the Third Reich.

As this plot powers along, the script by Seattle resident McQuarrie omits all the cliches of the Nazi-movie past (the obligatory Holocaust footage and torture scenes) and yet still manages to create an overwhelming sense of menace and generate more suspenseful mileage than perhaps any political movie with a known outcome since the original “Day of the Jackal.”

From the opening scenes, Singer puts us on the edge of our seats and keeps us there, employing all the technical skill and storytelling flair of his popular comic-book superhero movies (“X-Men,” “Superman Returns“) to tell a true story of a tragic hero in a death struggle with incomparable evil.

Cruise also deserves some credit. He may not have the theatrical stature the role seems to require, but he exudes the necessary charisma, and he creates a Teutonic character that’s believable, very different from anything he’s done before and utterly devoid of any hotshot mannerisms or movie-star nonsense.

Cruise the producer-mogul also has been careful to keep Cruise the star in line and balanced by a flawless ensemble of British actors: Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp. This top-drawer cast was frozen out of the recent Golden Globe nominations (as was everyone else connected to “Valkyrie“) but, to my eye, they all seem Oscar-worthy.

(Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer)