OK I am 40minutes through this movie, then suddenly I switched off.The story telling has badly executed very poorly, you don't get what's up. Out of context dialogues of random people. Maybe it will make sense later in the film, but how should I care if I already rage within the first 40% of the movie.The visuals are very bad, too dark, shadows all over the place. Of course this has been done on purpose, but it totally fails. I constantly blinked because of the eye strain due to my efforts of recognizing something. Also, why does the camera shake, is this blair witch?Not worth watching except you are one of those people which already admire a movie just because it picks up cruel facts of history.

Tim Blake Nelson's brave 'The Grey Zone' tells the story of a group of Sonderkommandos, the Jewish workers who were selected to gather the Jewish 'prisoners'to the gas chambers and then dispose of their bodies by burning them. The film is brutal in its portrayal and hardly leaves anything to the imagination. It also raises the question of survival. 'The Grey Zone' shows what happened to those who have fought, those who have submitted and surrendered, those who have refused to give up and those who have accepted their fate. All of them ultimately experienced the same fate. This is no movie with an uplifting ending or a message of hope. It is unsympathetic to the viewer. As director and writer, Tim Blake Nelson does a fine job by telling the story and fleshing out the characters. The editing is well done. The execution is slightly on the poorer side. It gives the feel of a TV movie. In the acting department it is Harvey Keitel and Mira Sorvino who stand out. Keitel is well acquainted with negative roles and thus it is no surprise that he pulls off the part of the Nazi officer. Sorvino has a smaller part but she displays Dina's anguish, courage and despair with skill. David Arquette is better than his usual. 'The Grey Zone' is a worth seeing because it depicts another side of the Holocaust with a brutally honest treatment and it is thought provoking because while it is easier for some to judge as an outsider, it raises the question of what one, what you, would have done had you been in the same shoes, knowing that you were going to die no matter what.

Despite all the realism depicted in THE GREY ZONE amid the actual day to day operations of a Nazi prison camp, there's a certain stage quality in the dialog that serves as a reminder that you're watching the screen version of a stage play and not what should seem more like a true life documentary. That's the fault of the script taken from David Mamet's play and other eye-witness sources--but the acting is excellent.And yet, it does manage to convey just how those prison camps used other prisoners to operate the gas chambers, to carry out the deed with false promises--"Just be sure to remember where you hook the clothes so you can pick up your belongings when you leave"--and the backbreaking jobs of loading trucks with dead bodies and depositing them on chutes that go directly into a blazing furnace. Amid all this, various stories are entwined involving the petty quarrels among the men assigned to these tasks so they could prolong their own lives for at least four months of assured survival.The story involving a girl who does not die during the twenty-minute gassing and is then revived and how the men argue over how to protect her from further harm, is intense and touching in that it shows the humanity that is still in their souls. Her story and how it ends is one of the film's most memorable and touching elements.This is more of an in depth look at "the final solution" than any other recent films dealing with the extermination of Jews has ever been, with the exception of SCHINDLER'S LIST and THE PIANIST in which the accent was more on the triumph of the human spirit and a much broader view of the war itself in epic mode.This is a darker, intimate look at the actual operation of the camps as experienced by a handful of prisoners--the brutality, the torture, and raises the question: how far would you go to survive? It also shows how not all the Jews were as passive about their fate as some have claimed, often opposing the Nazi officers and paying for it with their lives.In the hands of a greater director, it might have been an even more impressive film than it is, so that I'm unable to place it in the same class with the two films mentioned above. The cast is uniformly good, but HARVEY KEITEL is outstanding as an SS Commander keeping strict tabs on the camp's hard-working doctor.In its own way, it's just as important. Young students of history would be well advised to view this one for a better understanding of how "the final solution" was supposed to occur and the methods used to carry out an enormous project known as "the holocaust".

When I visited Auschwitz in 1990, I remember that my companion and I sat down outside the gates, once we were done, and cried for about an hour before catching the train back to Krakow.When I saw the first few minutes of this film, and those horrible buildings and the piles of ash that were still there when I visited, it brought everything back, but told a story I didn't know much about.It makes sense that the Nazi's would have used Jews to dispose of other Jews...they were totally expendable, and it's very logical, and perhaps that is why it is so horrible.The dialog is a bit Mamet like, yes, and you definitely know that you are watching something that was once a play, based on the somewhat mannered dialog and direction. And yet, it's a great story, well acted.Who is culpable? What would you do to survive? If you knew you were probably going to die, wouldn't you want to enjoy your last few weeks eating and drinking well? It's one of the very few films on the Holocaust I've seen that doesn't draw everything in black and white....what some of these men do to their fellow Jews is despicable, yet who amongst us can say that if he were hungry and desperate, he might not do the same.Definite food for thought.....and warning.. I wouldn't eat during this movie. You may experience some queasiness.