San Diego Reader

One of our finest Holocaust dramas. Robert Wieckiewicz is wonderful, but not posingly wonderful, as Poldek. The Catholic sewer-worker saved some Jews as the Nazis wiped out the ghetto in Lvov (then Poland, now Ukraine) in the year of hell, 1944. Capping a fine career, director Agnieszka Holland shows sewer filth, fear, love, greed, bigotry, and cruelty, and (supremely) faces as vivid as Goya graphics. Apart from some questionable sex in the septic depths and a strikingly “Aryan” Jewish hero, it feels like truth told straight about what really happened. 2012.

— David Elliott

• View trailer
• Rated R | 2 hours, 25 minutes
• Official website

Related links

• "The best and worst movies of 2012" • January 2, 2013

This movie is not currently in theaters.