‘A Woman in Berlin’

A powerfully told, devastating film, directed by Max Farberbock (who did the excellent “Aimee & Jaguar”) and starring German actress of the moment Nina Hoss, this is everything you want in adult narrative cinema: It’s intelligent, provocative and intensely dramatic. Its subject matter, however, is so taboo that it caused a scandal in Germany that lasted nearly half a century. That would be the period of postwar Soviet occupation of a half-deserted Berlin that resulted in what historians estimate was 100,000 rapes. This devastating, unswervingly unsentimental account is as powerfully authentic as anyone could want.

-- Kenneth Turan