Good start, but then it gets ruined

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

This German take on the Stanford prison experiment has additional layers of authenticity. Well made and interesting, masterfully acted and is much preferred to the Hollywood version.

20 male participants take part in a social experiment. For two weeks they will be housed in a prison, with a portion of them being guards and the remainder prisoners. Initially things go well, but after a while matters relations start to deteriorate.Superb movie. Great insight into the human psyche, herd instinct, how power corrupts and the depths to which we can sink. So good, it got remade by Hollywood, though to far less effect.

The movie was probably one of the best movies I've watched, it elicited not just thoughts and emotions but a physical reaction as well. I have never reacted this way to a movie. It was disturbing and traumatizing in the most beautiful sense. I love to test my mental boundaries and indeed this movie did it for me; it danced around my threshold for psychologically distressing works of art. I'm not forgetting this one anytime soon (or rather, the mental masochist within me hopes I don't).Das Experiment was intense, definitely (an understatement). But the build-up of this tension was handled so masterfully, in terms of the pacing of the movie. In summary, it is about a group of men who volunteer for a high-paying experiment; a simulation of prison life and the power struggles average men undergo when some men are given the role of being guards, and others, prisoners. I think you can imagine how it turns out. I feel that things got out of hand a little early in the experiment portrayed (but not in the pacing of the movie), but what can I say, I'm not a psychologist and I haven't read up on the actual experiment. Moving on, the bulk of the movie was very thought-provoking for me, and I had to let those thoughts pour out on in a longer version of this review, on my blog. The point where I stopped thinking is when the movie got so intense and what was happening felt so inhumane and unfair that I just broke down. I was distressed with the characters' situation and I could not take it anymore. It wasn't sadness, so I felt like it was really a break down from the intensity of the movie. After that I guess I stopped thinking too much and focused more on the eventual resolve of the movie. The scenes preceding the resolve were intense and exciting as well, but at this point I was just taking it all in more passively than before. In summary, it was raw, gripping and well-paced; I give it a 9/10.

I was excited to see a dramatisation of the famous Stanford experiment, as I've heard a lot about it. This version is set up pretty well, good cast, promising. I was surprised by a couple of odd "plot devices" in the first half hour: odd romantic meetings and high tech gadgets, but still giving it the benefit of the doubt. However, the second half diverts massively from the true story, thereby completely missing the point of this psychological folklore. Especially as I was expecting this to be mostly documentary of the experiment, I was horrified as it drifted more and more into Horror territory. And then a US remake too?!?!?! AVOID!!!!