Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Margarethe von Trotta's biopic follows the philosopher Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) from 1961, when she travels to Jerusalem to cover Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker, through the storm that followed her reports and her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. It is a talky period drama about a thinker working out an idea in public, and what it costs her with the friends and the community she belongs to.

Why it’s here: Most films about thinking make it look like a montage. This one lets it look like what it is: a woman in a chair, smoking, staring at a wall, trying to work out how an ordinary man ended up running a machine of murder. What's punk is what happens next. Arendt refuses to write the grief her community expects, publishes anyway, and loses friends over it. What's pedagogical is that the real trial footage of Eichmann is in the film, so you watch him talk and decide for yourself. Her argument is still contested, and some historians have since argued Eichmann was more committed to the ideology than she allowed, which makes it a better thing to watch, not a worse one.

Germany, near the end of World War II. Ten-year-old Jojo is a devoted Hitler Youth recruit whose imaginary best friend is a goofy version of Adolf Hitler. Then he discovers his mother is hiding a Jewish girl, Elsa, in the walls of their house, and everything he has been taught starts to collide with the person in front of him.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the nerve: Waititi mocks Nazism with slapstick and a ridiculous imaginary Hitler, then keeps turning the screw until the joke stops being funny. The pedagogy is in how it shows indoctrination from the inside. Jojo is a kid absorbing propaganda, pageantry and belonging, and the film shows how easily that happens and how a real person can break the spell. It is a satire, not a history lesson, and some viewers find the comedy too soft on the Holocaust; the film's answer is that ridicule is a way of denying the movement its dignity, not the suffering its weight. Waititi, who is Māori and Jewish, plays the fantasy Hitler himself. Best for teens and up.