Defiance

Daniel Craig may be the only straight-up action hero who gets taken seriously as an actor. Partly, this is because he occasionally chooses action-hero roles in semi-serious films, like Munich and Defiance. In both, he plays heavily armed Jewish men, which is mildly strange, since in real life, he’s an unarmed British man. Defiance is the story of a group of Jewish resisters who, during World War II, fled Poland and hid out in the forests of Belarus. Craig plays their leader, Tuvia Bielski, and Liev Schreiber plays his brother, Zus. Together, they fight and love and fight and love and fight and love, and lots of Nazis get killed, and there’s hugging and sorrow and the sort of really heavy violin music that tells you that, yes, this scene is sad, so feel free to weep. It’s all reasonably entertaining and not quite as deep as it wants to be, but the action sequences are great, and the forests are beautifully photographed, so on a big-enough screen, it’s definitely a movie.