The fact that we know how things turned out does not make the story any the less absorbing. The knowledge that the Jackal did not get De Gaulle, and that the Titanic did indeed sink, did not stop audiences making those films hits. We're not children who constantly need surprises. The thrill - and in essence, that is what Valkyrie is, a thriller - is in seeing how things went wrong, which bad turns were taken, whose character defects came into play and who was, ultimately, to blame for the failure. Singer's film is admirably clear on the crucial moments of indecision and the wrong assumptions that came in the aftermath of the explosion that left Hitler with just a few cuts and bruises.

The one message conveyed in this otherwise straightfoward, uncomplicated film is that the conspirators were acting out of a need to put an end to an ongoing crime against their country, that, in the words of Kenneth Branagh's General Tresckow, they needed to "show the world that we were not all like Hitler".

This kind of future-retrospective dialogue is common in historical films with an eye on the present, and it jars. It also tends to give credence to the view - brilliantly rebutted by Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners - that Nazism was somehow something done to the Germans. Which jars even more.