Two searing images lodge in the mind after watching Costa-Gavras' controversial indictment of alleged Vatican indifference to the Holocaust.

In the first scene, we see a group of mentally ill Germans happily cheering a Nazi rally, then being meekly led, by smiling nurses, to a cell attached by a hose to a diesel engine.

Secondly, a group of Nazis, resplendent in their black SS uniforms, peer through the spy hole of a gas chamber as the desperate scufflings of the inmates make the sealed door thud.

It's just a shame the rest of this movie cannot sustain the levels of emotional intensity achieved in the first reel, as it slowly settles back into a worthy but dull tirade against Pope Pius XII.

We see Berlin-based Father Ricardo (Kassovitz) consistently imploring the Vatican to act after he is given evidence of the Holocaust by SS officer Kurt Gerstein (Tukur), who has personally witnessed the Final Solution.

However, the Pope insists the German war machine must be allowed to function - death camps and all - so it can crush the greater evil... Stalin.

Funnily enough, Pius is given a relatively easy ride by Costa-Gavras - recent studies accuse him of flagrant anti-Semitism, and one biographer even brands him Hitler's Pope.

Ricardo is a fictional character, but the other central character - Gerstein - existed and is actually the more interesting... like Oskar Schindler one of the 'Good Germans'.

A staunch Christian, he found himself in the Waffen SS supervising the distribution of Zyklon-B to the death camps, a position he justified by claiming it gave him a rare insight into the Nazi heart of darkness.

You hope this film - which caused a storm among right-wing Catholic groups in Italy and France - will open a healthy debate in the manner Spielberg achieved in Schindler's List.

However, all too often it tips over into melodrama and the dialogue disintegrates into a series of well-meant but contrived speeches randomly tacked together.

It would have been more compelling if Costa-Gavras had stuck to Gerstein's enthralling story. Instead we get a sprawling, indigestible condemnation of Papal apathy as the cattle trucks rolled east.

Tim Evans