Say Something!

A young Edwardian Englishwoman, kissed once in the Florentine hills by an unsuitable free spirit, returns home to a proper engagement — and finds she can't stop wrestling with what she actually wants. Adapted from E.M. Forster's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in its gentle insistence that following desire is itself a political act against Edwardian repression. Pedagogical in showing how class convention polices romantic choice as much as any law does.

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.