Luke Holland's stark and revealing "Final Account" is a gift of memory to future generations, though it's one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil
clocking in at a swift 90 minutes, "Final Account" is like a teenager-friendly approach to "Shoah", designed as an introduction to issues of responsibility, guilt and the banality of man's inhumanity to man
archive footage, a lot of it previously unseen, doesn't quite pin the talking heads to the past they won't acknowledge, and Luke Holland's documentary ends up being too much, but also not quite enough
a sobering round-up of voices from the Third Reich; The film's technical work is exceptional, contributing a paradoxically peaceful feeling to a highly charged subject
a simple, unadorned study of everyday evil, one which balances eye-witness accounts with archive footage and wintry location shots of mountains, forests and leaf-blown railway tracks; German war testimonies chill the blood
a collection of interviews with the last generation of Germans who lived through the Third Reich doubles as an urgent reminder to keep history from repeating itself