“The Lives of Others,” the compelling new movie about East Germany currently in contention for an Oscar, is the story of two flawed individuals’ quest for moral redemption, but Michael Apted‘s “Amazing Grace” raises the bar far higher. It tells the tale of William Wilberforce, an unquestionably good man who set out to redeem the honor of an empire and, in so doing, saved millions of lives. Born in England in the middle of the 18th century to a wealthy merchant family, Wilberforce (ably played here by Ioan Gruffudd) rose to prominence in a nation that had discovered the virtue [...]

If there is nothing else to East Germany‘s credit (and, frankly, there isn’t), that grim, gray dictatorship did succeed in provoking two of the finest films to come out of a reunited fatherland in recent years. The first, Wolfgang Becker’s sweet, enchanting “Good Bye Lenin!” (2003) used one family’s crisis to examine both the year that Erich Honecker‘s then largely unlamented republic simply faded away and the way that layers of self-deception, “internal emigration,” and illusion had helped its citizens to weather those penned-in decades of repression, futility, and waste. Nevertheless, as moving and wonderfully perceptive as that film was, [...]