Prisoner of Paradise

Its uniqueness lies in its juxtaposition of happy faces and unhappy realities, of fleeting expressions of art and culture undone by daily brutality.

An extraordinary documentary about the German entertainer Kurt Gerron, has been timed to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Week, but the film would also fit snugly on a double bill with "My Architect."

An important and smoothly mounted meditation on moral choices within the entertainment biz.

Gerron's terrible film was never shown in the places it was meant for, but in Prisoner of Paradise it reveals a queasy corner of the Nazi mind that tried to imagine a concentration camp as it fantasized the inmates might have.

What distinguishes Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender's film from the many similarly themed efforts that have preceded it is that it tells a morality tale of a man whose hubris partially led to his downfall and whose willingness to work for his Nazi overseers resulted in one of the most notorious propaganda films of the era.

While Prisoners of Paradise gives us but an impression of Gerron's state of mind, the film does a powerful job of showing us how deflated, small, and desperate this boisterous man had become.

Frustratingly superficial.