Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

MAX should be seen as a film about the many roads we face at turning points in our lives and the arbitrary, chaotic circumstances that influence what path we ultimately take. A corollary theme is the random selection -the unfairness- of birth, station in life, class, etc. In this respect the maker of MAX would be hard pressed to come up with a better setting that post WWI Germany! I disagree with those faulting historical inaccuracies. They appear to miss the point entirely. The only legitimate "fact" we must be concerned with is that Hitler indeed had a burning desire to be an artist (though I think his setting was Vienna, not Munich) and had he been successful and/or accepted as such there's a strong likelihood he'd never encountered politics (or at least on the scale he did). MAX' pure invention of Hitler's racist influences and his start to power merely indoctrinate and I didn't find them at all offensive. The invention of Cuzack's Max is a clever -and direct- counterpoint to Hitler's social circumstances. The "bonding" of Hitler and Max shreds, trashes, etc., the pseudo-logic of National Socialism in particular and racism and prejudice in general. Applause is warranted.Noah Taylor is nothing less than spectacular. John Cuzack is again a gem. The rest of the cast is reserved yet hardly a character or piece of dialog is throwaway. Just a tremendous achievement.

In the year 1918 a man named Adolf Hitler wants to become an artist.Maybe a Jewish art dealer named Max Rothman would help him in achieving his dream.But soon Hitler finds out that politics is the new art.And what would work better for the crowds than the anti-Semitism? Max (2002) is the first movie Menno Meyjes both wrote and directed.John Cusack does brilliant job as Max Rothman, a character who didn't actually exist.Noah Taylor is terrific as Adolf Hitler, a role not everyone can do.Leelee Sobieski is marvelous as Liselore Von Peltz, Max' lover.Molly Parker does very fine job as Max' wife, Nina Rothman.Ulrich Thomsen is very good as Captain Mayr.Great job by David Horovitch and Janet Suzman, who play Max' parents.Max shows two frustrated men.Max Rothman is frustrated because he lost his right arm in the World War I, Hitler is frustrated his dream of becoming an artist just isn't going to happen.This movie shows another side of Hitler.We don't see the rampaging monster who wanted to put every Jew in the concentration camp and have them killed.This Hitler what we see here is a man who wanted to be an artist.I heard recently that some of his paintings were found in a farm in Austria.Those paintings are going on sale.Of course I would never have a Hitler on my wall, no matter how good of an artist he was.One might ask does this movie humanize Hitler too much.When you take off the monster's cloak, what does he become? A human? You can ask that from yourself.

Someone named holmest-2 entered a user comment fraught with claims of inaccuracies in the film Max. Holmest-2 is most certainly the inaccurate one; I find it implausible that this person has even read a full biography of Hitler unless he includes Mein Kampf as an accurate portrayal of Hitler's life. In the excellent biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (by James Cross Giblin), his life as a destitute street person is described. He tried to make it as an artist, was aided by a Jewish art dealer, was known to ramble about various political subjects in the day room of his government paid housing unit. Hitler captivated no one at the beginning. He was, indeed a pathetic loner, who would be befriended and then disappear as if to never get to close to anyone. For several months he was actually living on the streets of Munich. He was also painfully terrified of women and could only idealize them, yet not speak to them. Whatever holmest-2 said about Hitler's life in the immediate post WW 1 era is just plain wrong. To me the film showed Hitler as I had envisioned him in his lost years before he found his voice, his talent, and his vicious, evil inhuman purpose.

This film mirrors Hitler's own speaking style in the way it jumbles the truth, weaving fact with fiction in such a frustrating blur one can only respond to what it says by blurting emotional responses at the screen. In Ian Kershaw's exhaustive study "Hitler", and quite fully supported by the semi-autobiographical "Mein Kampf", we find that Hitler had already been a struggling artist (and had given it up) long before the outbreak of World War One, had a fully developed political agenda rife with anti-Semitism which was the Zeitgeist of the day(feeling of the times), and was hired by the military to give oratory in the public parks because of an already well developed talent for his anti-Jewish harangues. His talent for the diatribes was noted by the army because his comrades in the trenches had become sick of listening to the endless vitriol and had complained to higher-ups "that he wouldn't shut up". All the qualities that Hitler is portrayed by this film to have developed in some form of crisis while deciding between art or politics, this artistic flair for polemics, had already taken shape many years before. In "Mein Kampf", one reads from Hitler's own pen that the question of whether the Hasidic Jew he encountered "was a German" arose when he was in Vienna, which was about 10 years before the start of World War One. Curiously, Hitler himself was not a German either! There are many anachronisms in this film. One merely has to see a German military greatcoat of the era in a photograph to know that what Hitler was wearing was probably some Canadian military surplus of WWII. The rest of the costumes were very anachronistic as well, looking like the costume manager just rummaged through the neighborhood Sally Anne for old clothes. For instance, in 1918-1919, at formal gatherings people still wore top-hats. Hitler wore a top-hat to his inauguration in 1933! Collars were higher on the neck, sports coats had belts in the back at least, if not in the front too, and the leading edges of coats had round or tapered edges not square. The houses were decorated in a fashion not seen until Ikea came along, arc-welding, cars, and on and on. Some of the coarse language by Max's women friends can be seen to be out of place as well.Although all of these inaccuracies turn the film into a "what if" scenario, it still scores a few points with its implied assertion of Hitler's sexual dysfunction and the interesting proposition that if Hitler simply got laid at an earlier age his interests in life may have been diverted away from murder and imperious expansionism. But then again, he may simply have been a happily married despot. One tends to forget in these deep studies of Hitler's mind that it required an equally disturbed national psyche to follow him into the abyss that was Nazi Germany.When we examine Germans and the question of Nazi Germany with any truth, we see an advanced people much like ourselves, and so the examination should become one of introspection. People incorrectly try to pick apart the mind of Adolf Hitler looking to pin all the blame on a curious freak of nature, forgetting the influence of Nietzsche, and the thousands of anti-Semitic publications of the era. The moral, missed by the authors and so hard for the history re-writers to accept, is that we are all capable, given the correct circumstances, of becoming Nazis.