The Lives of Others

The opening scenes of this year's Academy-award winning Best Foreign Film promised a compelling experience of going inside the head of a participant in a system of political belief we know little about, except that it is going to implode in a matter of three or four years. The question of how people in the secret police of a utopian world convince themselves that they're doing good certainly fascinates me and bears a relation to debates that might be going on, unknown to me, inside the "war on terror" in our own country. Unfortunately, after that promising beginning the movie for me was a long unravelling into implausibility and unmotivated sentiment -- a big disappointment.