This is the best film I have seen about Hitler by about a country mile. Indeed, Ganz's masterful performance in the central role makes all other Hitler impersonators hitherto laughable! Ganz captures a man collapsing within himself as surely as Berlin in those last few days. We witness a descent into hell, a hell of his own making, a man who knows the end is nigh and yet refuses to accept that none of it is his own fault. His message to the German people says it all:
"If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it. I still would not shed a tear for them; because they did not deserve any better." - Adolf Hitler
His flashes of a rage that is now largely impotent outside the claustrophobic
walls of the bunker are terrifying. Ganz captures every flicker, every sinew, of a man having a mental breakdown. Physically, Hitler is a ghost in the shell of a man, stooped, his useless left hand kept behind him so as not to reveal the trembling. And yet, to the very end, this broken figure commands respect and fear in all around him. Ganz makes every facet of his character (including the brief moments of kindness and consideration to his staff) believable. A superb performance.
Elsewhere, the stand out performance from a chorus of well-acted parts, is Corinna Harfouch as Magda Goebbels. As the actress says it was the most interesting of the female parts (Junge remains a blank canvas and Braun seems to have been all surface, surface, surface). The clinical efficiency she portrays in killing her children, one by one, slowly, coldly, is the most harrowing scene in the film.
The Speer character is interesting as in some ways his brand of Nazism was the most dangerous as it was cloaked in charm and respectability. Speer escaped the hangman's noose for no other reason that I can see than because of his affability and because he said sorry.
Overall, the film is consistently gripping and compelling. However, it is not without its faults. Obviously, as the story is told from the point of view of Hitler's secretary you only see what she saw. Thus it is clear she didn't have much contact with Martin Bormann as his character is frustratingly neglected. That left me frustrated as I wanted to know more about Bormann and why he was so influential. To a lesser extent Goebbels is also underdeveloped.
The Junge character also made me wonder. Not as has been well documented about the reasons why this non-Nazi member stayed by her employer's side right to the end (and I still don't know the motives of this pleasant and seemingly innocent woman) but how central was she really in Hitler's life? Naturally in a film partly based on her book she is central to almost everything in the film, but that pushes out more important characters as suggested in the previous paragraph. And as we learn little of Junge it seems a waste.
The UK dvd set itself also isn't perfect. On the special features disc, the virtual tour of the bunker could have been better. In the biographies all we get of the actors aren't biographies at all but filmographies. I wanted to know more about the life and work of Harfouch for example as here in the UK she is relatively unknown. And The Making of Downfall feature uses alot of interviews that are found in the Cast and Filmaker Interviews section. A bit lazy that.
Overall though these are minor quibbles. Ganz more than makes up for it and the film from start to finish is a cracking story. If you only see one 2nd World War movie then make sure it is this one.
When writer-producer Bernd Eichinger read the galleys of historiam Joachim Fest's book Der Untergang ("The Dowwnfall: Inside Hitler's Bunker; The Last Days of the Third Reich"), he knew he had found the dramatic key to a film he had wanted to make for decades, but never thought possible due to its scope. Fest's book focuses on the final days of the Reich, and Eichinger saw that the horrifying epic of 
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