A Woman in Berlin

It's intelligent, provocative and intensely dramatic. Its subject matter may be tough but it is as powerfully authentic as anyone could want.

One of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora's box of German suffering in World War II, A Woman in Berlin takes on the mass rape of German women by victorious Russian soldiers entering the country in 1945.

Joins such wonderful recent films as "The Lives of Others" and "The Baader Meinhof Complex" as a clear-eyed portrait of a highly charged chapter in Germany's history, a history that once again proves rewarding fodder for an alert artistic imagination.

A Woman in Berlin, which is based on an anonymously written memoir of the same name, serves also as a testimony to women who put men in their place.

Like "The Reader," this film treads unsteadily over the terrain of German guilt.

A stately, intermittently gripping, ultimately overlong drama.

Unfortunately, Färberböck never gives us reason enough to sit through such unremitting punishment. Though the story is based in truth, an emotionally removed Hoss feels more like a symbol than an actual person, while her detached narration keeps us at further remove.