Trailer of the Week: Valkyrie

From the director of Superman Returns, comes the return of Hollywood's own erstwhile Übermensch, Tom Cruise, in a thriller about a secret Nazi plot to assassinate Hitler. We hear Kenneth Branagh declaring, "We have to show the world that not all of us were like him," which in itself is easy, since neither Cruise nor his British costars make an effort to sound German. The effect recalls Star Wars: everyone's dressed like Nazis but sounds like the BBC. Yet the movie looks like a Hitchcockian treat, and my only worry is Tom. In Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, Cruise put on a baseball cap and expected us to believe him as a New Jersey longshoreman. Despite the impressive profile comparison above, I'm not sure a sweet eyepatch is enough to make him Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
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Valkyrie is rated PG-13 and opens Dec. 26.
Image comparing Stauffenberg and Tom Cruise in Valkyrie