Lore, from Australian director Cate Shortland, proceeds like a long-ago fairy tale, dark-hued, grounded in real-life 20th-century horrors.

Lore is a akin to a bourgeois German version of Elem Klimov's 1985 Belarus-set Come and See, and it has some outstanding features. The star turn is the lurking cinematography of Adam Arkapaw.

The Australian director Cate Shortland has made a quite stunning film about the collapse of Nazi Germany, seen not from a Berlin bunker but through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl.

[Cate] Shortland get[s] up close and personal with intimate, handheld camerawork as Lore confronts what she’s been taught and her family’s legacy of fascism and genocide, blue eyes popping with judgment, hate, fear, confusion, and, finally, resolve.