Divorce is described in Noah Baumbach’s masterful “Marriage Story” as like a death without a body. Something has been lost. There is grieving, anger, denial. In his personal and moving story, Baumbach captures the insidious nature of divorce, how two well-meaning people who still care about each other will do things they would never think they would do. Surely, you’re not the kind of person who would use secrets as a weapon in a divorce case? You wouldn’t turn a child against a parent to gain an advantage? It’s other people who do stuff like that. With remarkable grace and compassion for his characters, Baumbach portrays divorce as a great equalizer, turning us into versions of ourselves we didn’t expect to become.

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1933. An ambitious young journalist, Gareth Jones, travels to Moscow to uncover the truth behind Stalin's Soviet propaganda that pushes their "utopia" to the Western world. When he gets a tip that could expose an international conspiracy, Jones' life and the lives of his informants are at stake. Based on a true story that would later inspire George Orwell's seminal book Animal Farm.

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Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life tells the story of an Austrian farmer’s defiance in the face of a regime that contradicted his deepest beliefs. “A Hidden Life,” a film that puts us deep inside of a situation and examines it in human terms, rather than treating it a set of easy prompts for feeling morally superior to some of the vilest people in history. What’s important here is not just what happened, but what the hero and his loved ones were feeling while it happened, and the questions they were thinking and arguing about as time marched on.

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A God-fearing ex-con (Samuel L. Jackson) saves a despondent college professor (Tommy Lee Jones) from throwing himself in front of a speeding subway train, and struggles to comprehend the suicidal man's unwavering despair during a series of intense philosophical debates. Adapted from the play by Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, The Road).

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The title is an understatement, and so is the film. Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" tells the story of a Polish Jew, a classical musician, who survived the Holocaust through stoicism and good luck. This is not a thriller, and avoids any temptation to crank up suspense or sentiment; it is the pianist's witness to what he saw and what happened to him.

The film is based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, who was playing Chopin on a Warsaw radio station when the first German bombs fell. Szpilman's family was prosperous and seemingly secure, and his immediate reaction was, "I'm not going anywhere."

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