By Mick LaSalle

To give the highest recommendation to a Holocaust movie is to anticipate a certain resistance in the reader. Such resistance is understandable. One might think that years and years of seeing Holocaust movies would create an immunity, a point at which you can feel no more. But in fact, it works the other way. The more you see, the worse it gets, so that at the beginning of "In Darkness," watching the Nazis march naked Polish women into the woods, toward their own mass grave, I just didn't want to go there again.

But "In Darkness" is an extraordinary movie, and somehow good art creates its own uplift. This Agnieszka Holland film rises to its subject, so that the overall experience of it is far from dispiriting. Poland's candidate for the best foreign film Oscar - it has a real chance of winning on Sunday - deals with real-life events in the city of Lvov, in the last year of the German occupation. It's a gripping piece of history and also an exploration into the mysteries of the human soul.

The mysterious soul in question is that of Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a Polish Christian who works as a sewer worker but augments his income with shady deals and thievery. Socha is nice enough to his wife and daughter, but there is no way to call him a nice guy.

One day, a group of Jews comes to him and asks for his help because he knows the sewers better than anybody, and he can hide them there. He agrees, but for a price. He has no apparent human sympathy and, at first, even considers double-crossing them.

But something happens inside Socha - and this is a big part of what makes "In Darkness" so effective and truthful: The change in him is never stated in an overt way. Nor is there some Movie Moment of transition, in which he goes from mercenary to compassionate. Rather we just watch as his life becomes increasingly taken up with bringing food and provisions to the Jews in hiding, despite considerable personal risk. We see the change in him expressed in action and in hints, just hints in Wieckiewicz's wonderful performance, that there are hidden depths here. The "darkness" of the title might easily describe the human soul, and it's where much of the movie takes place.

Physically, much of the movie takes place in the sewers (with part of the movie filmed in an actual sewer), and though the frame is dark, the setting is vivid - you can almost smell it and feel the damp. If Socha isn't all bad, the Jews are not especially virtuous. They are people under extreme stress, each one handling it differently, some worse than others, not one Gandhi in the bunch. The spectacle is not of horrible things happening to good people, but of horrible things happening to regular people - that's closer to home and more unsettling. And as they bicker underground, atrocities are taking place above.

Holland never loses track of the grand movements, but she's at her most brilliant finding the subtleties of interaction in David F. Shamoon's screenplay - the strange look, for example, that crosses Socha's eyes when he talks with his Nazi friend, a Ukrainian who has found a place in Hitler's army. Perhaps the mystery of Socha's soul, the reason he risked everything, resided to a large part in simple orneriness, an unwillingness to be told what to do.

This may, in the end, be Holland's point, though if you see "In Darkness," you might very well come up with something different: It's possible to have courage without humanity. But it's impossible to have humanity without courage.

PINA is a feature-length dance film with the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, featuring the unique and inspiring art of the great German choreographer, who died in the summer of 2009.

PINA is a film for Pina Bausch by Wim Wenders.

He takes the audience on a sensual, visually stunning journey of discovery into a new dimension: straight onto the stage with the legendary Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch ensemble, he follows the dancers out of the theatre into the city and the surrounding areas of Wuppertal - the place, which for 35 years was the home and centre for Pina Bausch's creativity.

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THE IRON LADY is a surprising and intimate portrait of Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep), the first and only female Prime Minister of The United Kingdom. One of the 20th century's most famous and influential women, Thatcher came from nowhere to smash through barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male dominated world. 

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