Denial (2016)

I think someone else said "generic" and that is the most accurate description of this film.

I think the story is interesting (in real life) but not every real life event should be turned into a movie, and this is probably one of those events. The holocaust is a travesty, but this movie shouldn't have been made.

First off, the dialogue is absolutely horrible. Every scene feels like forced exposition rather than a genuine communication between characters. This is why half the main character's lines are questions, we're just being told what questions we should be asking and then told the answer.

Second, why spend so much time talking about how silly the British system of law is. That's just offensive.

Third, the hero is never in any sort of jeopardy. From the outset she's afforded a high price team of lawyers and she's going up against a person who's so poor he has to represent himself.

Fourth, they spend a whole lot of time speculating and assuming how nasty the villain is and what he'll do if he has the opportunity to interrogate a holocaust survivor, yet we never actual see him do anything horrible. In a movie, you have show why the villain is bad, not say why he's bad, or speculate why he's bad.

Fifth, there's so much build up of trying to get the holocaust survivors on the stand to testify, yet, the main character never makes a decision to not put them on the stand. That's a big problem in a story if the main character never learns something about them self, never makes any decisions, never changes at all through the whole movie.

Overall the biggest problem with the movie is that the main character isn't likable. I was never cheering for her. Maybe in real life she's great, but in the movie, she bashes a person in a book, then bashes the British legal system, then tells the million dollar lawyers how to argue the case, then bashes the lawyers while waiting for the verdict. She just bashes everyone but does nothing herself.

I had really high hopes for this movie and I can't imagine being more disappointed.

Fmovies: Greetings again from the darkness. Guilty until proved innocent. It's a concept that is inconceivable to Americans, yet it's the core of British Law in libel cases. When once respected British historian David Irving accused American scholar and educator Deborah Lipstadt of libel, based on her book that accused him of being a Holocaust denier, the burden fell to Lipstadt to prove not just that Irving's work was a purposeful lie, but that the Holocaust did in fact take place.

This is the first theatrical release in about 15 years for director Mick Jackson, who is best known for his 1991 L.A. Story and 1992 The Bodyguard, and for his Emmy-winning 2010 TV movie Temple Grandin. The script is adapted, from Deborah Lipstadt's book, by playwright David Hare (The Reader, 2008), and the courtroom dialogue is taken directly from trial records and transcripts. Like most courtroom dramas, the quality relies heavily on actors.

Rachel Weisz plays Ms. Lipstadt with a brazen and outspoken quality one would expect from a confident and knowledgeable Queens-raised scholar. Timothy Spall bravely takes on the role of David Irving, a pathetic figure blind to how his racism and anti-Semitism corrupted his writings and beliefs. Tom Wilkinson is the barrister Richard Rampton who advocates for Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin Books in the libel suit brought by Mr. Irving. Andrew Scott plays Andrew Julius, the noted solicitor who also handled Princess Diana's divorce from Prince Charles. Others include Caren Pistorius as an idealistic member of the legal team, and Alex Jennings as Sir Charles Gray – the sitting judge for the case.

Of course for any sane human being, it's beyond belief that a Holocaust denier could achieve even a modicum of attention or notoriety, much less have the audacity to bring suit against a scholar who simply published descriptions of that denier's own words. Rather than come down to fact vs opinion, a more fitting title would be opinion based on fact vs opinion based on a lie. If the words used against Irving in Lipstadt's books are true, she would win the case. In other words, she had to prove that he was a racist, an anti-Semite and knowingly misrepresented the facts in his works as a Holocaust denier.

Mr. Jackson's film begins with Ms. Lipstadt as a professor in 1994 at Emory University (where she remains employed to this day). In 1996, the lawsuit is filed, and in 1998, Lipstadt and Rampton visit Auschwitz. Though the courtroom drama and corresponding legal work takes up much of the film, it's this sequence filmed at Auschwitz that is the heart and soul of the film. Very little melodrama is added Â… the scenes and the setting speak for themselves.

The trial finally started in 2000, and as always, it's fascinating to compare the British court of law and process with that of the United States. The formality is on full display, but nuance and showmanship still play a role. The film and the trial ask the question Â… are you a racist/anti-Semite if you truly believe the despicable things you say/write? This is the question that the judge wrestles with (and of course, "Seinfeld" had a spin on this when George stated "It's not a lie, if you believe it").

It's been a rough movie week for me with the Holocaust and slavery (The Birth of a Nation), but it's also been a reminder of just what wicked things people are capable of, and how current society continues to struggle with such inexplicable thoughts. Kudos to Ms. Weisz

the movie is poorly written with a soul intention of defaming one person and possibly to show what happen to holocaust deniers. the makers of the movie didn't realize that the people who knew nothing or have very little knowledge about holocaust actually will become more skeptic rather than sympathetic.

i am not a sympathizer of David irving and frankly i never knew him before this movie. watching this movie one thing was clear, the writer was clearly biased against David irving by not showing his part of argument.

the movie was based on a case which was carefully constructed by powerful lawyers team against one defenseless person and their strategy to proving him a liar instead of countering his claim with facts. at the end of the trial all they managed to prove that Irving was an anti-semite and did manipulate the fact but the point of whether holocaust actually happened or not remain a question.

i watched this movie hoping that there will be trials based on facts to prove and historical event but sadly i am very disappointed.

the only good thing about the movie is the acting of lead actors. Rachel weisz was exceptionally good. Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall and Andrew Scott did a good job

Denial fmovies. Some people seem to have a big problem with this film. I didn't. I found it very interesting and while not mind-bendingly great, it wasn't the horror that it's presented to be in some of these reviews.

"Denial" is based on the book "History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier." It is the story of Deborah E. Lipstadt (Rachel Weiss) and her legal battle in a libel trial brought by Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall).

In the British legal system, the burden of proof is on Lipstadt, who has maintained in her writings that Spall has fudged certain facts and left out others to make his case that the Holocaust did not happen. Her team, led by Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) and Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) make it clear to the feisty Deborah that they are putting Irving on trial. They are not interested in Holocaust survivor testimony, because they say that Irving will make mincemeat out of them since their memories often aren't perfect. They do not want her to take the stand. The trial is to prove the truth of Lipstadt's writings about Irving.

One of the reviewers wrote that the Irving portrait is highly distorted. The dialogue in the courtroom is verbatim from the actual transcripts. You tell me if this man is a Jew-hating racist or not and if he in fact misrepresented facts to fit his agenda. No one said he didn't have a right to believe what he believed, to make jokes about other races during speeches, to teach his daughter racist songs, make fun of the Holocaust, and write his opinions. But he brought the lawsuit because he was accused of distorting facts, no one else did.

The most moving scene was the team's visit to Auschwitz, very well photographed and movingly acted.

The acting was sensational, though I have to admit that Rachel Weisz did overplay at certain points. She is a wonderful actress, and having seen her in person in "Betrayal," I can testify that she's unbelievably gorgeous in person. But the director could have toned her down a little in some scenes. Andrew Scott is one of the finest young actors around, and he's brilliant as always. Tom Wilkinson is perfection as Richard Rampton.

Why this film should have incited such awful comments on this board is beyond me. It's a movie. If you want to know more about Holocaust denial, read up on it. Read up on Irving. See if you think his character was distorted. Everyone knows films use dramatic license.

Denial is not perfect. It has some clichés, it has the David v. Goliath thing going - and yes, none of that is new. But it doesn't deserve to be trounced on like a work of Satan.

For Denial, the most shocking thing about this film was that it was made in 2016. Everything about the camera work is so bland and uninspired at introducing Professor Deborah Lipstadt that if enough context was removed this film could literally be about any female professor that's liked by her students.

The initial barrage of Professor Lipstadt's routine is a series of extremely bland cuts from organically lit shot to organically lit shot, and in that barrage the blandness emerges. The trope of the beloved professor is so shoehorned in to create a character for Prof. Lipstadt that I feel completely alienated from the character at large. Denial's pacing alone is so bizarre at jumping to the lawsuit that I'm wondering why I should care about a story fighting Nazism. Jackson feels as though he's done enough to make me empathize with Prof. Lipstadt by showing me at the 14 minute mark how she'll be fighting an uphill legal battle. Around the 19 minute mark, Jackson choses to actively waste our time with an extremely unoriginal rainy London sequence to establish that she has arrived, and even though it's a minute long it's failure of purpose makes it stand out so belligerently. Rachel Weiss' acting as Lipstad feels so inorganic that I am completely skeptical and extremely bored by lines meant to be inspirational as "my mother always said there was gonna be an event. That I was picked out, I was chosenÂ… well here it is." (16:01) That alone is one of many lines that seems to have been taken verbatim from a book. Denial at large is a very aggressively okay film, and at large it seems as though the only thing it's missing is commercial breaks. A quick look through Denial's director's past works shows that the vast majority of his experience prior to his 2016 film is in television. Denial's entire goal of presenting an uphill battle for truth against hate, with it's recurring shots of stairs among other grandiose imagery of rising above, fails so spectacularly entirely because of it's pacing and strange dipping in and out of Documentarian nature.

If a film tells me that it's "based on true events" then why on earth is it showing me meaningless dates and times? Saying your movie is "based on true events" is the most blatantly lazy form of opening a film beyond subtitles showing location and narration, which this film also does. Denial if anything seems in denial of the fact that it's not an HBO series, but a film.

I recommend this movie for people who, like me, make time for conspiracy theories despite loathing them. Outside of the interesting "intentionalist versus functionalist" debate, "revisionism" erroneously connotes academic legitimacy. The title is therefore apt.

All the dialogue pertaining to the defense's fascinating legal strategy went over very well with me. That and the much appreciated verbatim courtroom dialogue comprises most of the script. My positive impressions were reinforced by subsequent research into the trial. Denial delves into the sinister practice of Holocaust denialism at its best. I stretched my viewing over several hours and basked in the cerebral delight of it.

Rachel Weisz has been given flak for a performance that did not leave me in want of anything. Though I would not say it was an award-worthy performance, I chalk that up more to the formulaic production than any shortcoming of hers. Tom Wilkinson deserves mention as her character's barrister. Timothy Spall is terrific as David Irving!

This glowing review notwithstanding, Denial has the feel of excellent television, which is no way to compliment a feature film. The defense's true-to-life legal strategy necessarily undercut the film's emotive power. The scenes at Auschwitz itself are therefore especially vital to its success for me. Including London's Boadicea and Her Daughters was a nice touch.