YES – See "In Darkness" – Even If You've Seen Other Holocaust Movies!

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So many Holocaust movies: "Schindler's List," "The Reader," "Shoah," "Europa Europa."

I knew "In Darkness" would be frightening, depressing, and disturbing.

So, I didn't want to watch "In Darkness."

Big mistake. "In Darkness" is a masterpiece. It's better than "Schindler's List." Yes, it is disturbing to watch, but it is great art, and great art, even as it moves us to tears, rewards us. You already know about the horrors of the Holocaust. The gift of "In Darkness" is that it transports the viewer to a better realm, where the best of humanity shines in the worst darkness we humans have produced. That best of humanity is not just Socha, the rescuer, but the filmmakers who, through their art, tell the world Socha's story.

"In Darkness" has a verisimilitude, indeed a "darkness," that other Holocaust films do not. No one in this movie would look appropriate placed on a pedestal. Everyone here – Jews and rescuers – is a deeply flawed human being. The Jews hiding in the sewers look and act the way people hiding in sewers would look – filthy, hungry, and bedraggled; they are sometimes petty, jealous, and vengeful. The film is dark and claustrophobic. The Nazis are not sexy and thrilling. They are murderous scum. Not only do characters speak Polish, Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, and Russian, where appropriate, they also spoke Balak, a dialect typical of Poles living in Lwow. Krystyna Chiger, who survived the sewer, said she found the film so real it was hard to watch.

None of the actors are well known outside of Poland or Germany, so I was able to invest in them as the characters they were playing in a way that I could never invest in "Schindler's List," which, of course, featured big stars I'd seen in other films – Ralph Fiennes, the handsome lover from "The English Patient," was suddenly giving an Oscar-bait performance as a fat Nazi; Ben Kingsley was no longer Gandhi, but a Jew in a concentration camp.

Robert Wieckiewicz as Leopold Socha gives one of the very best, most absorbing, most believable film performances I have ever seen. Wieckiewicz is utterly believable as a petty thief who makes one right choice that leads him onto a path that awakens his soul. He starts out as a rough guy, an opportunist, who isn't ready to be as cruel as life invites him to be. The Nazis are paying bonuses to anyone who turns in Jews. Socha, already a petty criminal, who had initially helped Jews for money, could have made the choice to hand Jews over to the Nazis, for even more money. He didn't. He decided to do the next kind thing. And the next. And the next. And he becomes of the most moving, heroic people you will ever see onscreen. If Socha's entirely believable transformation doesn't make you cry … you are tougher than I am.

Benno Furmann is especially memorable as Mundek Margulies, one of the Jews who escapes to the sewers. Furmann has pale blue eyes that shine out intensely in the dark sewer scenes, communicating outrage, sorrow, panic, and caged macho. The tense dynamic between him and Socha electrifies their scenes. Theirs is a male-male relationship utterly beyond what any current Hollywood "buddy" movie could hope to portray.

Kinga Preis is quietly moving as Wanda Socha, Leopold's plump and freckled, earth-goddess wife. Maria Schrader as one of the Jewish women in hiding adds poignancy without doing anything showy. Michal Zurawski as Bortnik, a Ukrainian who does the dirty work for the Nazis, is very handsome sickening, and terrifying. You can see that Socha could have turned out like his old friend Bortnik. But, somehow, he didn't. Why? Because Bortnik was Ukrainian, not Polish – and thus treated differently by the Nazis? Because Bortnik was more handsome? We don't know. We just get the sense that before he made the one choice that set him on a path that would turn him into a beast, Bortnik was probably much like his old pal, Socha.

"In Darkness" is a feature film, not history lesson or a documentary, but for this viewer it dramatized aspects of the Holocaust, and of humanity, that other Holocaust films have failed to adequately address, or to address at all.

I've never seen a film that brought home to me so vividly the mass killings of Poles that Nazis carried out. Of course I know about these killings, but, as Joseph Stalin allegedly said, "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." "In Darkness" depicts a mass hanging of randomly selected Polish civilians, killed in retaliation for the death of a German. This scene was orchestrated in such a way that it grabbed me as dry statistics on the page never have.

"In Darkness" defies revisionist histories of World War Two that insist that Poles did nothing to help Jews and that Poles were enjoying the high life during the Nazi occupation. "In Darkness" makes clear – Nazis treated Poles with special brutality. Dramatic tension is never lost, even as the viewer learns something he would never learn from something like "Schindler's List."

"In Darkness" focuses on a Pole who rescued Jews. This defies popular uses of the Brute Polak stereotype to rewrite World War Two history.

Never for one minute, though, does "In Darkness" stop being a big, involving, tense, movie-movie. You care about the characters. You are swept along by the action. You hold your breath during scenes of suspense. You root for success. You tear up when things go wrong. After all that has gone before, the final scene, as humble as it is, is overwhelming. This is just a great film. See it.