DVD Roundup: Valkyrie

Tom Cruise was born to play a Nazi.  That intensity, that razor-sharp jawline, those fiery, piercing eyes, that flinty, seething voice trembling with conviction.  They're the traits that have made him an movie icon. They're also traits that bring to mind dreams of ubermensch and lebensraum and a bunch of other scary German words, spoken by a whippet-thin man in a sharp black uniform and glistening jackboots.  Watching Cruise play the blandly heroic Wehrmacht officer Claus von Stauffenberg, who planted a bomb meant to kill Hitler in 1944,  you wonder just how creepily effective it would be to see Cruise putting all of that force-ten charisma and certainty behind, say, a death camp commandant.  It would be like Denzel Washington in Training Day, but much more disturbing.  I know Christoph Walz just won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for playing the jew-hunting SS officer in Tarantino's new movie, but part of me wishes that Mr. OT Level Seven could have found time in his schedule to slip on the swastika in earnest.