I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Good movie but grossly overrated

Best movie ever!

A Masterpiece!

Greetings from Lithuania."The Grey Zone" (2011) is a disturbing, a must watch movie to learn and remember. The things that are portrayed in this picture are not the once who anyone would lime to remember, but hey happened, and they must be witnessed to understand that true nature of humankind is sometimes unforgiven. This is very well made movie, not gore in images, but brutal in showing reality, that you can't just simply turn away from. This is not "Schindler's List", and yet it contains stuff, that you won't even read in books, or see in movies. Overall, 8/10 for a portrayal of human low key, it's unforgettable when you will see it, not for sensitive soul viewer.

If his is indeed an accurate portrayal of a group of Jews who survived a few extra weeks by doing the bidding of the Nazi pigs who run the extermination camps, God help us! This is one of the bleakest things I have ever seen. We, of course, have to ask the simple question, "What is life worth?" If the answer is everything, then we can understand why these poor souls did what they did. In every portrayal of these camps, we see how powerless the inmates are. They are face daily with pistols and machine guns. They are arbitrarily shot in the head for crying, or just standing in the wrong place. They are the victims. What about the Germans? How can a human being do this to another and take pleasure in it? I know how naive that question is, but it is certainly at the central core of everything. The closing scene is so hopeless and so gripping. There are almost surrealistic moments, almost like those in silent films where a face is made to stand for a thousand words. I doubt I could watch this again. I also don't know that there is another holocaust film that can affect one any more than this.

The Grey Zone furnishes soul and significance for an episode that's little more than a postscript in history books, the story of the Jewish work units in the Auschwitz concentration camp. These prisoners were made to assist the camp's guards in shepherding their victims to the gas chambers, then disposing of their bodies in the ovens. Nelson attempts to utilize the past to remind us of the fragile vagueness of our own principles, that most of us will never have to know what we might have the capacity for in particular conditions.And yet Nelson's dialogue is like a horse race. It sounds like American slang and divulges its theatrical roots, which works against the potent acting and the intrinsic impact of the subject matter. His screenplay needs to show more of the catch-22, instead of have his characters put on hostile debates about it. No doubt there is much tension created through all the tug of war, but characters are too graceful and fluent while speaking under pressure and in conflict. I don't feel anyone's true nature comes through in their words, except perhaps Harvey Keitel's surprisingly becoming SS officer. You can virtually hear the components of his principled device stirring as characters rap their adages and aphorisms. There's an affected purpleness to everything. Sometimes it works and sometimes shrieks of pretension. Nelson takes an emotionally inconceivable situation and comes close to sterilizing it with self-conscious technique. But ultimately, these are defects that, ironically, make fodder for subsequent discourse.Nelson, an actor himself, knows experientially how to stimulate and inspire his cast, which is comprised of other strong performances than just Keitel's. Needless to say he must also know how to make an actor seem not to act, how to put him or her at their ease, bring them to that state of relaxation where their creative faculties are released. I think for every time that's done successfully here, there are just as many instances where we see through the baroque artifice.Whether its sense of style seems to trivialize the authenticity of its situations, that's not to say it aims for the heart and misses. There are nevertheless many extraordinarily bleak and, most significantly, unflinchingly emotional scenes and moments that it's out of the question that you'd not be moved by the film. The violent rebellion, played not for hero worship but with somber fatalism, using minor key tonality in its score. If this story must be told and retold, and to be sure it must, then The Grey Zone is to be praised for discovering a new approach. The film's feeling for images gives it a grave intensity, but it's thrust by the acting, self-conscious or not. And not like many mainstream Holocaust films, even great, monumental ones, The Grey Zone is actually frank enough to renounce the prospect of hopefulness in Auschwitz. Or the world.The film sneers at how we, most of us, more than we'd like to know, feel we can generalize about groups of people, races, nations, ethnic and religious groups, how in the bleakest of examples of this shameful human weakness gone to the extreme, it is all self-fulfilling prophecy. When you take away the rights of people, when you dehumanize them, they will of course work as corruptly and extremely as you to survive your oppression. One day sit down and make a list of groups of people in any or all countries, not least of which ours, that can be equated to this, and you may see a less distilled, less explicit holocaust that may or may not end.

Having long since ashcanned organized religion for the ethical content of movies, I strongly recommend this one and "Out of the Ashes" for something other than the ordinary Holocaust movies.You see these Jewish prisoners pushing the carts holding the bodies of their fellow Jewish prisoners into the furnaces. In one instance, a man is pushing the cart holding the bodies of his wife and three children. When I later, a staunch capital punishment foe, saw them pushing a live Nazi soldier into the furnace, I was happy........shows you the effect of the movie. I went instantly from 'Forgive 70 times 7" to "An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth." So thin is the patina of civilization.The most heroic act I saw here, which reminded me of Jean Moulin's attempt at suicide so that he wouldn't divulge secrets of the French Resistance, was the female prisoner impaling herself on the electric wires of Auschwitz. She had stood and watched as the Nazi officer executes one after the other of her fellow female prisoners. One note that stands out is physical...the arching shiny steel fence-posts look much like some of the statuary I've seen elsewhere, perhaps meant to evoke memories of those inhuman extermination camps. Last night I saw the map of the 'work camps' and the 'extermination camps'...I didn't realize how many of them there were.Another reason this film is good for a discussion group is that it somewhat contradicts the idea that 'The Jews went submissively to the ovens." To watch the efforts made to make bombs within those prisons and the continual arguing among the prisoners as they try to come up with a way to liberation is wonderfully enlightening. Nothing is allowed to be 'easy', not even the uniting of these prisoners for a common cause....to save their lives.As I watched the Nazis, and thought about the dehumanizing of the enemy du jour, that has to happen for our good children to kill others, I wondered, "Have there been any memoirs written by Nazi soldiers in those camps, any that would give us some insight into how they turned into murderous barbarians?" Although this movie was not given high marks because of it's stylized format, I found that this artifice help me to take in what ..if done realistically...would have been too much to bear.