Their friends Greta (Katharina Schüttler) and Viktor (Ludwig Trepte) are far less shy, though their relationship is illegal, since Viktor is Jewish. ‘Drive My Car’: In this quiet Japanese masterpiece, a widower travels to Hiroshima to direct an experimental version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”.‘Passing’: Set in the 1920s, the movie centers on two African American women, friends from childhood, who can and do present as white.‘Spencer’: Kristen Stewart stars as an anguished, rebellious Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s answer to “The Crown.”.‘Summer of Soul’: Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in Questlove’s documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival.Scott and Manohla Dargis, selected their favorite movies of the year.

Part melodrama, part combat action movie, the film, written by Stefan Kolditz and directed by Philipp Kadelbach, chronicles the lives of five friends who are presented as more or less typical young Germans. Sensationally popular in Germany - decidedly less so in Poland, where its depiction of anti-Nazi partisans as unkempt anti-Semites provoked public outrage - “Generation War” tries to assimilate the unfathomable barbarity of the years between the invasion of the Soviet Union and the fall of Berlin into the conventions of popular entertainment. In effect, it is a plea on behalf of Germans born in the early 1920s for inclusion in a global Greatest Generation, an exercise in selective memory based on the assumption that it’s time to let bygones be bygones. This may, in the abstract, seem fair enough, but the film slips into a strange, queasy zone between naturalism and nostalgia. Its lesson is that ordinary Germans - “Our Mothers, Our Fathers,” in the original title - were not so different from anyone else, and deserve the empathy and understanding of their grandchildren. As the Second World War slips from living memory, as Germany asserts its dominant role in Europe with increasing confidence, and as long-suppressed information emerges from the archives of former Eastern bloc countries, the war’s cultural significance for Germans has shifted.Ĭoming after the silence of the ’50s and early ’60s and the angry reckonings of the ’70s and ’80s, “Generation War,” emotionally charged but not exactly anguished, represents an attempt to normalize German history. “Generation War,” which was broadcast as a mini-series on German television last year, is perhaps more interesting as an artifact of the present than as a representation of the past.

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