One of the great things about historical movies is that you learn about things that have happened that you thought you knew about or in this case, something that you never knew even existed.

Over the years I heard rumors about some diseased people in the world who have denied that the Holocaust has ever happened but I never knew that one of them would be the subject of a major trial in England that cost many millions of dollars to prosecute and many years to prepare for and try. David Irving is an author of several books about Hitler, Germany and World War 2. Irving is also the most famous Holocaust denier. Deborah Lipstadt is an American historian and writer of several books, including one book discrediting Irving for attempting to deny the Holocaust, which is the reason for the lawsuit he filed against her and her publishing company. My thoughts while watching this movie were that how can anyone even consider denying something that so obviously happened? There are thousands of hours of videos, dead bodies, evidence including clothing, teeth, human hair. There are many crematoriums and concentration camps all throughout Europe, the most famous being Auschwitz. Even in the case of David Irving who is an Anti-Semite and clearly mentally ill, you would think that he would not want to bring a libel case against case Deborah Lipstadt, who wrote the book Denial Holocaust History on Trial where she called Irving a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot, and said that he manipulated and distorted real documents, because of course, he would lose, how could there be any doubt of this?

What this movie points out is that when you look at this case like a lawyer and without emotion then the entire legal argument changes. First of all, in England when you are charged with libel the burden of proof is on the defendant and not on the plaintiff, which is the reverse of how something like this is trialed in the United States and is also the reason why this case was tried in England. The law firm in England that handled this case, spent about 6 years reading the many books that David Irving wrote plus his many hundreds of diaries, looking for errors and discrepancies in his arguments that tried to prove the Holocaust never happened. The firm found many discrepancies and at one point of the movie the lawyer trying the case Richard Rampton, played extremely well by Tom Wilkinson told the court a great analogy about a waiter making mistakes with money and statistically speaking if the mistakes were honest ones, then they would be over time be errors both in his favor and in the favor of the customer. In the case of the historical mistakes in David Irving’s books, all of his errors were in favor of Hitler and denying the Holocaust and this was used against him in court. David Irving played extremely well by Timothy Spall was cross-examined several times by Rampton in the courtroom scenes and these are the best moments in the entire movie. “No holes no Holocaust” was another big point in the movie where Irving made the case that of the so called crematoriums were not crematoriums at all, because their roof’s had no holes in them. This was also disproven by the defense that was able to provide pictures from high flying airplanes during that time, clearly showing that there were in fact holes in the roofs of these buildings.

Most surprisingly this entire case was far from ever an easy win for the defense because they had to prove that not only were many of the historical facts in Irving’s writings were incorrect, but they also had to prove that he deliberately created and altered these facts to serve his own end of trying to prove that the Holocaust never happened. On top of this, the defense called no witnesses or victims of the Holocaust because their strategy was to make the entire case about Irving and never give him the opportunity to cross-examine any of the victims of the Holocaust. This strategy understandably created conflicts between Deborah Lipstadt and one Holocaust victim and resulted in several huge arguments between Lipstadt, played very well by Rachel Weisz and the lead attorney of the firm Anthony Julius played by Andrew Scott. Considering the time and money the law firm Lipstadt hired to defend this case and the fact that if they lost their entire firm would be ruined, you can just imagine the pressure this law firm was under for a long period time as they prepared for and eventually tried this case. I thought this movie was very well done and I do recommend it.

“Do you like puzzles?” This is the central question throughout this movie based on the complex story and while watching this 2-hour film you realize within the first 30 minutes that you are going to have to wait until the end of the movie before all the pieces of this story are fully resolved.

The movie “The Accountant” has a rather complex screenplay written by Bill Dubuque who also wrote the screenplay for the recent movie “The Judge”. The story of this film is told in unusual ways, mostly through flashbacks that span over a 30-year timeline that explain the life story of Christian Wolf (The Accountant), played by Ben Affleck who has Autism with a very high IQ. Because of the physical training his father put him and his brother through, due to his fears that his Autistic son would be abused in life, the Accountant develops outstanding karate skills as well as great ability with all kinds of firearms. He is also extremely gifted with numbers which leads to not only his profession as an accountant, but also to his eventual business of laundering money for criminal organizations. How he gets into this part of his professional life is not fully explained as are some other aspects of this story and most of the loose ends are tied up at the end of the movie – but not all of them, which creates a sense that you are missing something when the movie ends. I found this part of the storytelling a little bit frustrating because I still had some questions at the end.

In order to fully appreciate this movie, you have to buy into the fact that an extremely Autistic man is able to not only overcome this handicap; but also has incredible martial arts and skills with firearms as he kills about 15 people in this movie. Some of this is difficult to buy into but at least this movie is unique in that no action star in movie history has ever been Autistic. This is really the first physical action movie that Ben Affleck has ever starred in during this 20-year career in movies, unlike his best friend Matt Damon who has made several action movies, including the Bourne franchise and I thought he did a very convincing job with this role. In some ways, this film reminded me of Good Will Hunting which was the breakthrough film for both Affleck and Damon in 1997. The main similarity I noticed were when some of the scenes of extreme intelligence of Christian Wolf are demonstrated. In this movie, there are a series of scenes where Christian Wolf performs a massive forensic accounting investigation over a 15 year period for a Robotics company, whose CEO is played by John Lithgow. The fact that he does this in one day and is able to find several small complex random errors is extremely impressive and is just one demonstration of his very high IQ. This is the part of the film where Wolf befriends an employee of the Robotics company named Dana Cummings, played very well by Anna Kendrick and this collaboration leads to some violent conflict which is resolved at the end of the movie. The very end of this movie includes a scene which ties up the biggest question of the entire film, which is who is the computer voice that directs The Accountant through his accounting and violent confrontations? The answer to this was rather hard to believe although I did not consider it to be a deal-breaker type of flaw in the story. The Accountant is a very solid dramatic movie and I do recommend it.

Kevin Hart has always understood that great stand-up comedy is about rhythm and timing more than anything else. During his stand-up performance in the new movie “Kevin Hart: What Now” Hart demonstrates his deep understanding of comedy rhythm and also has a great rapport with his audience. Hart also understands that jokes have never really been that funny, what is funny are stories and situations that people can strongly relate to and Kevin Hart is the master of this kind of comedy.

Hart’s stand-up act which is the subject of this movie was filmed at a football stadium in Philadelphia in front of the largest audience in the history of stand-up comedy. Before the performance part of the movie started, there was a James Bond-like mini-movie with actress Hallie Berry that I thought was a good idea that mostly worked. The actor Don Cheadle also made an appearance in this part of the film as well and was pretty funny with his argument with Hart. There were several new ideas during the stand-up act that I thought also worked for the most part, including showing scenery on a giant screen behind Kevin Hart and displaying visual aids that even included phone texting messages that complimented what Hart was talking about during his act.

It is clear to me that Hart is more successful with this type of a movie more than some of the other movies he has made in the past, which for the most part have been pretty average. Overall this movie was good, but not great and not too much different than Hart’s four previous concert movies. For fans of Kevin Hart and fans of quality stand-up comedy, this movie is a must see event. There were several moments of solid laughs during Hart’s stand-up act but not too many that are laugh out loud funny. This concert film was a solid addition to Hart’s other comedy movies and I do recommend it.