Starring Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Heino Ferch, and Juliane Kí¶hler. In German with English subtitles. Unrated.

How do you handle an archetype of infamy? In the case of Adolf Hitler and his crazed neocons-excuse me, I mean protocons-20 metres of dirt and concrete, topped off by a few cans of precious petrol, seems about right. And yet there are moments in history when it pays to unearth what was supposed to be long-buried.

Although movies about the Second World War have gone through many phases of fashion and popularity over the past six decades, the nation at the centre of the European conflict has steered relatively clear of them. It's noteworthy that no German actor has portrayed Hitler in any serious film about the period, and that remains true as the Swiss-born Bruno Ganz-familiar from soft-spoken roles in so many Wim Wenders movies-delivers in Downfall what may stand as the definitive Hitler.

Ganz plays the Fí¼hrer in the last few weeks of his life, when there was virtually nothing left to lead, other than a few kids and old men hastily given weapons and scrapheap uniforms and a coterie of fanatics licking his last dollops of congealed wisdom off the walls of a labyrinthine bunker far below Berlin. Hitler himself, we now know, was probably in the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease (with stomach and other ailments still only surmised), not to mention the dementia that kept him moving imaginary troops around on tattered military maps.

Ganz is good, but in the hands of director Oliver Hirschbiegel (previously best known for Das Experiment), the story also centres on others whose memoirs or interviews have given us a fairly reliable picture of what happened in Hitler's last 10 days. These include chief architect Albert Speer, house intellectual in a crowd that hated the life of the mind, and Traudl Junge, his last secretary and the subject of the fine 2002 documentary Blind Spot. (The actors who portray them, Heino Ferch and Romanian-born Alexandra Maria Lara, were principals in the similarly themed The Tunnel.)

The new film, scripted by Bernd Eichinger, with nods to books by Speer, Junge, and Joachim Fest (there is now also a wealth of corroborative evidence only recently released from Soviet archives), accepts Junge's morally convenient view of herself as someone ignorant of Hitler's politics yet drawn to him as a charismatic figure. Indeed, we don't usually picture so many women around Hitler, and here he is seen as a kind of jackbooted rock star, with the swooning Frí¤uleins led by Eva Braun (played as a canny party animal by Nowhere in Africa's Juliane Kí¶hler) and Magda Goebbels, who breaks down at the thought of her leader-not husband Joe-croaking in the bunker but thinks nothing of murdering her six angelic children.

That's the movie's most chilling sequence, although the many street scenes, with children battling Russian tanks and death squads executing deserters and recalcitrant Berliners, offer tough stuff as well. (Doubly so when you discover that they were actually shot in St. Petersburg.) The rest of Downfall's swift-moving 156 minutes is devoted to various reactions within the Nazis' ranks to the regime's rapid decay. These range from lunatics who prefer to shoot themselves rather than live in "a world without National Socialism" to the military doctor (Christian Berkel) who finds his conscience in the final days and tries to save as many civilians as he can.

The filmmakers may have served up that last character as a redemptive figure-after all, he must have done something to get that SS insignia on his lapels-but as an act of expiation, the film is important to a German audience. For the rest of us, well, we can weigh the falling plaster and 11th-hour howls against other murderous schemes dressed up as romantic idealism. Today there are more bunkers than ever, and every Abu Ghraib is simply another pit stop for Democracy on the March.