Rosenstrasse

Director and co-writer Margarethe von Trotta provides a compelling history lesson as she resurrects a heroic and little-known protest by women that openly challenged the right and might of the Third Reich. In 1943 in Berlin, German male Jews married to Aryan wives were rounded up by the SS and confined in a multiple-story building. Sections of the film in which a gradually self-empowered group of women faces down Nazi machine guns in hopes of forcing the release of their imprisoned husbands, or even just getting a glimpse of them, are indeed powerful. These scenes unfortunately unfold in splintered flashbacks from a rather stiff modern melodrama in which one of the now-elderly protesters (Jutta Lampe) mourns the death of her once-imprisoned husband by—much to the concern of her family—embracing her lapsed Orthodox beliefs. In German with English subtitles.