The Survivor

This is a bitter sweet tale of horrors, love, guilt and redemption. There's also some boxing.

It's extremely well acted.

It's well worth watching all the way to the end.

I was not only in awe of this story but in awe of the remarkable performance by Ben Foster...also including and was great to see Danny Devito!!.. Leguizamo...Peter Sarasgard...awesome!!

This is not a war movie. It's not just a love story either.

This is a film about enduring memories, and how we live with them, suffer them and move on from them.

The story is simple, a man looking for his lost love, but falls in love while looking. But he can never forget... The acting is beyond the pale and I truly don't understand how Foster has not had an oscar yet. He reminds me of a young DeNiro in the way he takes on all of his roles.

The photography is absolutely exquisite, the direction superb, the dialogue always wise and meaningful Every performance in the film is great but Foster is out of the league altogether with his.

If you love cinema and acting, watch it.

The survivor doesn't have the sparkling spectacles of liberation but it got a clear revelation of survivor's day-to-day trauma. What's remarkable about this story is how it translates to modern lives dwelling in the cutthroat society, the guilt, helplessness and questionable consciences when thrown together produces a truly dramatic visualization of a life lived in two extremes in two different eras. Hertzka's painful struggle to start his life from where it was uprooted and Schneider's sociopathic obsession to live on his desires is a clear provocative constrasts. The remarkable performances, flawless story and clever visual set-up put this movie higher up in ranks.

Good movie I would recommend. But directors left out quite some stuff about his life. Could have filled the second part with it. Learning about real-life Harry Haft gives him more complexity as a person. The following is one of the things that's left out:

'The elderly couple harbored Harry Haft in their small farmhouse, believing he was an injured German soldier who had been separated from his unit. Haft killed the couple the following morning after the husband began to badger him with questions about his eyepatch and whether he was German. Haft feared that they would turn him in to German authorities. He collected food from their kitchen and ran off and hid in the Bohemian Forest for weeks.

Eventually, he ran out of food and searched for another farm. He again had the same plan of telling the owners that he was an injured German soldier who had been separated from his unit. When a middle-aged woman answered the door, she could immediately see that he was an imposter and called him out for it. "You're not a soldier. You're not even German," she told him. Stricken with fear that she would turn him in, he went into a blind rage and pulled out his revolver and shot the woman. He headed to the kitchen to steal food when he heard a noise. He found a boy of about 12 years of age, presumably the woman's son, hiding in a bedroom closet. Haft told the boy to stay in the closet and then he quickly fled the house.'