Stephen Daldry

[8] A young German man (an award-worthy David Kross) has an affair with an older woman (Kate Winslet), only to discover many years after the affair ends that she was a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After she is found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison, the man (later played by Ralph Fiennes) still can’t get her out of his mind. …

[6] Thomas Horn stars as an nine-year-old boy who searches New York city for the lock to a mysterious key owned by his father, one of the victims of the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. I can’t make up my mind if it’s clever or overly-sentimental that Horn’s character has Asperger’s syndrome. On one hand, his lack of emotional perception keeps the …

[9] The Hours is a fascinating exploration of three women living in different times and different places, each of them struggling to find their personal bliss against the pressures and expectations of marriage and motherhood. The film is a meditation on death and sacrifice — obviously not the kind we associate with men on the battlefield, but the quiet, stifling kind suffered by people, traditionally …