Samantha Morton in 2002 — Minority Report, Morvern Caller, In America — is the apotheosis of, at least, a certain style of acting, an almost unconscious sensitivity to a given moment, a depth that hits her face even before she starts thinking about the dialogue or perhaps especially if she doesn’t have any dialogue. In the early years of her career she was primal and overwhelming especially if you know anything about her biography.

As Agatha, she is literally immersed…

The fall of the Iron Curtain, which made many Holocaust records and sites—including Auschwitz—newly accessible to researchers and visitors from the West, also coincided with the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, and occasioned an enormous upsurge in remembrance and memorialization across public life and popular culture. In contrast, Fred Uhlman’s novella Reunion, which consists in large part of a recollection of the early 1930s, was written in 1960 and published in 1971. It’s a product…

vintage Dumb Smart Movie (as opposed to a Smart Dumb Movie) whose intellectual gloss on an ostensibly highbrow milieu tops out at dichotomies of liberalism and conservativism, idealism and pragmatism, ambition and humility which are obviously analogous to horserace coverage of American electoral politics. (The script is less sophisticated than the characters, but more sophisticated than Academy voters.) This would be fine, especially if the Illuminati hadn’t assassinated Alan J Pakula, but unfortunately, Berger thinks this is a movie about…