WHAT TO WATCH

Escape from Germany (in theaters)

Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is put yourself in danger for the sake of someone else.

That bravery shines bright in T.C. Christensen’s “Escape from Germany,” which highlights a lesser-known historical chapter from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Following the lives of real members in the hours just before the start of WWII, it’s a deeply touching look at what average people will risk to do the right thing for each other. If you’re at all the type of person to get choked up during movies, you will absolutely shed a few tears by the end of this film.

In the movie, a lone missionary has to make his way through Nazi-controlled Germany to find more than 70 scattered missionaries. The borders are about to close, war is looming on the horizon, and if he can’t give them what they need there’s no way for these young men to get safely out of the country. Will he be able to find them all, or will he be the one to get trapped in the middle of the oncoming war?

The movie has a stronger grounding in fact than a lot of history-based movies, and in a lot of ways has more faith in it as well. The Nazis are kept to facts and a few key scenes, relatively tame moments that still perfectly illustrate the brutality we know they committed. The fear and bravery of the young missionaries, particularly Paul Wuthrich as Elder Seibold.

By the end of the movie, you’ll care enough about these people that the parade of real-life pictures and information through the credits will get you just as emotional as the movie itself. Stay all the way until the very end, where you’ll get one last, perfect little detail that will make the whole movie even more special.

Grade: Three and a half stars

Civil War (in theaters)

War is horrifying, but it’s great for cinematographers.

That’s the truth behind pretty much every war film ever made, including Alex Garland’s “Civil War.” Shot on cameras designed to make it look more like live news reports than a safely removed movie experience, Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy plunge viewers into the heart of a war that turns familiar American images into bloody, brutal nightmares. It takes an immense amount of talent to make a sensory nightmare this immersive, and a great cast brings a human element that makes the movie more emotional and darker by turns. If the center didn’t prove as hollow as every American-made movie about the Middle East, this movie would have been unforgettable.

America’s modern civil war is in full swing when the movie starts, following a group of journalists as they cross war-torn land for an impossibly dangerous story. Kirsten Dunst is our POV character, a longtime war journalist who is constantly fighting her own battle between defeated cynicism and the last shreds of her empathy. She makes us feel every shred of the weight she carries, and Cailee Spaeny and Wagner Moura are great as the ghosts of where she’s been and where she might let herself fall.

Garland, however, makes the same mistake that American filmmakers so often commit during war movies. The political pathway to this fictional civil war has been scrubbed clean, the backstory so disconnected from anything real that it might as well not be there at all. Wars like this are awful realities around the world, and a horrifying possibility here, but divorcing them of context makes them seem like unstoppable nightmares rather than the reality of our day-to-day choices. Peace doesn’t just disappear – it’s chipped away by money, power, hatred, and the inattention of thousands and thousands of people. That’s the real lesson of war, and one that movies too often forget.

Grade: Three stars