Movie review for the day

Rico says he hasn't seen In Darkness, but he would, based on A.O. Scott's review in The New York Times:

Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, inspired by the real exploits of a Polish sewer worker and sometime burglar named Leopold Socha, who helped Jews during the Nazi occupation of Lvov (now Lviv, in the Ukraine), provides the latest evidence that the Holocaust movie has become a genre in its own right. Even a true story can follow the familiar conventions of film narrative, and this tale of a righteous gentile selflessly assisting in the survival of a handful of persecuted Jews is no exception.
This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the movie. It is suspenseful, horrifying and at times intensely moving. But the ease with which it elicits these responses from the audience feels more opportunistic than insightful. Feature films about the Holocaust are often celebrated for preserving memory and raising awareness of the pervasive horror and occasional heroism of a fast-receding history. But who among the ticket-buyers is likely to be unaware of the broad outlines (and even the terrible particulars) of the Nazi genocide?
You do not go to a movie like this to learn, but rather to feel: to pity the victims, despise the villains, and identify with both the vulnerable and the brave. In Darkness, which was written by David F. Shamoon (drawing on the book In the Sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall), obligingly supplies the desired emotions, which means that, in spite of its grim setting, it is finally more comforting than troubling.
Socha, known as Poldek, is played by Robert Wieckiewicz, a wonderful Polish actor with meaty features and an engagingly blunt manner. Early in the film, Poldek and his young colleague (and criminal sidekick), Szczepek (Krzysztof Skonieczny), who use the sewer tunnels as escape routes and hiding places for their loot, stumble on a nightmarish scene in the forests outside town. What they see— a group of naked, terrified women being chased and shot by German soldiers— serves as a haunting reminder of the fact, amply documented in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, that ordinary Poles knew what was happening to their Jewish neighbors.
The liquidation of the ghetto offers Poldek and Szczepek new possibilities for looting. They also discover that a small group of Jews have taken refuge in the underground waterways, hiding in the shadows amid the waste and vermin. Poldek helps them, first as a business proposition— they have money to pay him— and, eventually, out of a sense of moral obligation. His ethical awakening provides one of the film’s dramatic arcs as, like Oskar Schindler in the paradigmatic Righteous-Gentile movie Schindler’s List,” Poldek evolves from self-seeking operator to humanitarian hero. He must overcome the skepticism of his wife, the ever-present threat of the Germans and the intrusions of Bortnik (Michal Zurawski), an old prison buddy who now wears the uniform of the Nazi-supporting Ukrainian militia.
Poldek’s Jews, meanwhile, huddle in darkness and enact their own parables of human nature under duress. They seem as carefully selected for diversity as the soldiers in a World War Two platoon picture. There are, among others, a wealthy, sophisticated couple (Maria Schrader and Herbert Knaup); a philandering husband; a fallen woman; a pious man; a drug addict; two children; and a handsome, clean-shaven tough guy (Marcin Bosak, somewhat resembling Daniel Craig in Defiance). In the course of their fourteen months in the sewers, some will die, some will fall in love, and a baby will be born, all of it rendered in shadowy, glimmering half-light by Holland and her cinematographer, Jolanta Dylewska.
The visual contrast between the worlds above and below ground is handled beautifully and evocatively, and it gives In Darkness the dreamlike quality of a fairy tale. Constriction and freedom— and the assertion of individual will in cruelly oppressive circumstances— are themes Holland has explored before, in The Secret Garden, Washington Square, and her earlier World War Two drama, Europa Europa.
Those films were somewhat more attentive to psychological nuance. Here there is greater emphasis on the social complexities of wartime Lvov, which are represented above all by the linguistic polyphony of the dialogue. German, Yiddish, Polish, and Ukrainian compete for attention, and the languages are markers not only of ethnicity but also of class and ideology.
This cacophonous music— more than the pushy, maudlin musical soundtrack— provides In Darkness with a kernel of authenticity, as does Wieckiewicz’ stoical performance. And as I have said, it is not a bad movie: it is touching, warm, and dramatically satisfying. But that, given the subject matter, is exactly the problem.

Rico says this is reminiscent of Mila 18 by Leon Uris...