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List Price: $19.99 | | Label: Paramount
Salesrank: 625
Released: June 2, 2009 |
| Our Price: $11.94 |
| Used Price: $4.34 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
JEWISH BROTHERS IN NAZI-OCCUPIED EASTERN EUROPE ESCAPE INTO THE BELARUSSIAN FORESTS, WHERE THEY JOIN RUSSIAN RESISTANCE FIGHTERS AND ENDEAVOR TO BUILD A VILLAGE IN ORDER TO PROTECT THEMSELVES AND ABOUT 1,000 JEWISH NON-COMBATANTS.
Description of Defiance:
Three ferociously committed actors fill the roles of the Bielski brothers, Jewish partisans who escaped into the forests of Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Daniel Craig (taking a break from 007 duty) is Tuvia, the leader of a group of refugees who eventually number over a thousand; Liev Schreiber is Zus, the antagonistic warrior; and Jamie Bell is Asael, a peacemaker no less devoted to the survival of the community. The three performers give life to director Edward Zwick's account of this little-known chapter of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, which otherwise plays more like a history lesson than a full-blooded movie. The film's best achievement is its strong location work, in Lithuania--as the community makes its home in the forest, the landscape becomes an important player in the drama at hand, and the changing of the seasons is charted with bone-chilling detail. Schreiber manages to get a little wry humor into this otherwise sober enterprise, and Daniel Craig creates an unusual character: a sort of anti-Bond, a hero whose body is all too fallible and whose decision-making is sometimes hesitant or morally compromised. It's a rare hero in a World War II movie that tends to withdraw from scenes rather than stride into them, but that's what Craig does. More than likely, the movie's main achievement will be sending the curious to read the histories of the Bielski brothers and why they matter in the chronicles of the Holocaust. --Robert Horton
Stills from Defiance (Click for larger image)
Defiance Reviews:
A MUST SEE 
2009-11-07 - Ever since I saw the advertisements for this video I was waiting for it to come to my theatre. If it ever did, I missed it. Tried to purchase it at my local Walmart but it never arrived. Finally purchased it here and the wait was worth it. It is a very good movie. In fact it is the kind of movie that you can watch multiple times and see something that you mised. I highly recommend this video to anyone. It was fantastic.
Defiant Defiance 
2009-11-05 - Defiance is a movie about a little known effort of Jewish brothers to not only protect about 1000 Jews from the Nazis, but to form them into a self-defending community. It's not a special effects movie although there are battle sequences and the characters are well developed and believable.
Starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber it also includes a substantial supporting cast from several countries, each reknown in their own right.
Highly recommended.
Better than I expected
2009-10-26 - The Bottom Line:
Unfairly derided as middlebrow, this intelligent World War II film by Edward Zwick wisely eschews action for a more nuanced exploration of the rigors of leadership, the endemic nature of antisemitism in Russian cultures, and the difficulty (and importance) of survival; one of the more underrated films of 2008, Defiance is a movie worth seeing.
3.5/4
The Jew's Brigade: Protecting & Paying Back!
2009-10-19 - Edward Zwick's compromise with this film is absolute: he directed, wrote and produced the movie.
Usually movies based on historically facts are plagued with inaccuracies. Fortunately this is not the case as it wasn't with "Glory" (1989) also directed by Zwick!
The story, based on real characters, follows four Belarusian brothers of Jewish ancestry driven into the forest to escape the Nazi extermination parties.
There they will be joined little by little by other escapees till they number more than a thousand.
Tuvia Bielski the elder brother takes charge of them and organizes them into a heterogeneous Brigade. He decides that if they are able to live one more day and die free, it is worth the sacrifice.
Incredibly they survive against all odds: collaborationist police troops, Nazi SS troops, refractory non-Jew civilians and prejudiced Soviet militia.
No weapons, no food, no shelter, no experience. Only their outmost determination to survive and pay back sustains them!
Playacting is over standard with Daniel Craig as Tuvia, Liev Schreiber as Zus Bielski, Allan Corduner as Shamon Haretz and Ravil Isyanov as Colonel Panchenko as the best of a compact numerous cast.
Edward Zwick delivers one his best film up to this day. Better IMHO to "The Last Samurai" (2003) that was a very good one and at par with "Glory" (1989).
I hope he will give the public a good version of one of my favorite fiction book: "The Lions of Al-Rassan" (promised for some date in the near future).
The musical score is due to multi-awarded James Newton Howard, he has eight Oscar's nomination, including one for this film, between 1992 and 2009 and won numerous ASCAP awards. The equilibrated score underline different kind of sequences: action, romance, depression, nostalgia or defiance.
Portuguese Eduardo Serra is in charge of cinematography and produce excellent forest images.
This is for me one of the best films showing resistance movement in occupied Europe. Enjoy!
Reviewed by Max Yofre.
Over the Top
2009-10-19 - "Defiance" captures the gritty and often ugly facts of guerrilla warfare in WWII's Eastern Front. The fact that it was filmed in Lithuania doesn't matter, as only a few kilometers and an artificial barrier in a trackless forest separated similar partisan bands fighting the same enemy. There is, I see, a tendency to do some backward projecting: that is, these Jewish refugees are acting too much like modern Israelis, rather than Diaspora Jews. While it's true that some of the toughest Jewish commandos of the Israeli War of Independence cut their teeth in the forest wars of Europe, the film makes too direct a connection. It's easy to forget that the majority of people in these communities were not "tough Jews" and did NOT fight back. It was not in their history or culture to do so. Resistance was offered by an exceptional few - like the Bielskis - young men with their bridges burned and nothing left to lose, including memories; while the majority around them clung to tradition to carry them through one more round of trouble. But the film at least is honest enough to show why this majority, as portrayed by the ghetto elder, refused to "act" with doom staring them in the face.
Still one of the better examples of the Holocaust genre.
