Ben Crair at Slate writes that "One way to measure the approach of the new year is to count the Holocaust films at your local multiplex. The holidays arrive just as studios begin wooing academy members with serious dramas, and there's nothing more serious than genocide." This year has certainly filled theaters with a bumper crop of Nazi slash Holocaust movies, including Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, Stephen Daldry's The Reader, Edward Zwick's Defiance, Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected, Good, which is based on C. P. Taylor's play and which opens in select cities today, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was sent from Hell by the devil in lieu of a new STD. Crair breaks these kinds of films down into various categories, such as the ones hailing the courage of "Good Germans", such as Valkyrie (as well as earlier films such as The Desert Fox, starring James Mason as Rommel, Marlon Brando's Nazi of conscience in The Young Lions, and, of course, Schindler's List; tributes to the bravery of "Resistant Jews", such as the ones in Defiance, who have the good fortune to be led by someone played by the actor currently employed as James Bond, Daniel Craig; "Redemption Stories" about survivors trying to find their way back to normal life and human feeling, such as Adam Resurrected or the Sidney Lumet film The Pawnbroker, starring Rod Steiger, which yesterday was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Crair also has a category called "The Fable", which may be just because he had to come up with something to call Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, and Slate he couldn't have called it what I would have called it because Slate does not carry an "Adults Only" advisory.
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