“The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words.”

This movie is not particularly gory, but it is absolutely grueling.

One of the greatest American novels of the past 30 years is giving a Fairfax County high-school student a bit of agita. Naturally, the kid’s mother wants it banned.

There’s an textual epilogue at the end of Agnieszka Holland’s new Oscar-nominated World War II drama that confirms something that I suspected throughout the film: the director was angry. Like most movies that involve the Holocaust, this is a story of struggle against adversity and the triumph of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable actions. But most of those films look at the atrocities with a sad resignation — what’s done is done, so better to mourn than to rage — that balances whatever triumphal notes there are in the story.

DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Menachem and Fred This Wednesday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in commemoration of the date that Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945. It was in that camp that the parents of this documentary’s title characters were killed. Menachem and Fred were saved because their parents made the decision – before being moved to…