Paradise.
It feels almost pointless to say by this point in history, but films about the Holocaust are always immensely complicated undertakings. To capture the horror, to make sense of the senseless, a filmmaker must achieve a perfect balance of empathy, confidence, fearlessness and a thousand other impossible-to-wrangle elements. Now and then, the alchemy is achieved, the most recent example being 2015's Son of Saul.
More often, the result is something like Paradise, Andrey Konchalovskiy's new Shoah film that too often falls into old-fashioned and easy-to-wring melodrama. Basically a three-hander, the plot pivots around a member of the French resistance, a French collaborator and a German SS officer. Their paths cross in horribly painful ways, adding up to a product crafted with good intentions, but less skill.
Konchalovskiy does capture some beautiful images amidst the hideousness of the era, shooting in stark black and white and moving his camera around with caution and care – but ultimately this is a nightmare that's been visited by more artful and creative minds.
Barry Hertz