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This 1948 feature film by Wanda Jakubowska, a Polish survivor of the death camp, is both forthright and nightmarish, and invented the cinematic language with which to make the Holocaust thinkable

In 1948, Polish socialist film-maker Wanda Jakubowska released this gripping and pioneering film about the Auschwitz death camp in which she herself had recently been imprisoned, using actors and nonprofessionals and partly shooting in what remained of the camp itself.

Jakubowska’s film influenced every subsequent director of work on the subject, including Resnais, Pontecorvo and Spielberg, and arguably invented the visual and dramatic language with which cinema attempted to make the Holocaust thinkable: the striped uniforms, the blocks, the bunk-beds, the brutal roll-call musters with emaciated prisoners swaying and passing out, the informants, the complicit kapos, the bizarre prisoners’ orchestra which doggedly played as the everyday brutalities were carried out. There were also the different types of Nazi: the icy functionary,...

Berlinale Specials is the festival’s incorporates all out-of-competition titles.

The Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 20-Mar 1) has added two world premieres to its Berlinale Special strand.

The first is Anne Fontaine’s drama Police [original title Night Shift], which stars Omar Sy, Virginie Efira and Grégory Gadeboias a trio of Paris police officers forced to accept an unusual mission. Studiocanal is handling French distribution and international sales.

Veteran filmmaker Fontaine’s previous films include Venice best screenplay winner Dry Cleaning (1997) and Coco Before Channel (2009).

The second is Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons, which stars Bpm (Beats Per Minute) lead Nahuel Perez...

Mark Cousins is captivated by film. The director-film historian’s 15-hour documentary “The Story of Film” traversed the globe for a comprehensive look at cinema as an art form. His latest feature documentary, “The Eyes of Orson Welles,” digs into helmer-actor Orson Welles’ highly visual world, exploring his now legendary life and work. And debuting at Venice Classics Documentary Film section (it also played for press and industry at Toronto), a four-hour peek at Cousins’ next docuseries: “Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Film,” a 16-hour voyage covering the mostly omitted and unrecognized contribution of women directors. Executive produced and narrated by Tilda Swinton, the series aims to challenge the ignorance surrounding women filmmakers.

Edited as a master class, the cinematic lesson features only female teachers. Forty thematic chapters answer 40 questions on how films are made from dissecting topics like openings to tone to believability. Scenes from works by Hollywood’s established,...

For the fifth year running, we tally up the Other Year's Best -- the films that made it to DVD (or onto U.S. home video in any format) but not to theatrical, which generally meant they posed too much of a marketing challenge. As in, the films were either too odd, too original, too archival, too subtle, too something. DVDs still stand as our go-to B-movie-distribution stream of choice, although as I've barked every year, video debuts are still not eligible for any year-end toasts or trophies. Except ours.

10. "Parking" (Chung Mong-hong, Taiwan) At first blush a Taiwanese riff on "After Hours," this measured little odyssey is more realistic, evoking those all-night odysseys we've all had, when time evaporates and tiny logistical dilemmas drive us insane and eventually it's morning and something about our lives is different. Chung doesn't spring for laughs when you think he will -- he holds back,...

For most Americans who care, the Holocaust-on-film story runs something like this: outside of the release of newsreel footage after the war, and a few tame references in quasi-noirs like "Paris Underground" (1945), the extermination camp phenomenon was too recent and too toxic for mainstream film, until Alain Resnais assembled "Night and Fog" (1955), and an examination of the freakish period could begin in earnest.

It's a timeline that makes emotional sense, given the wholesale trauma involved, but it's also far from true, as the recent DVD release of Wanda Jakubowska's "The Last Stage" (1948) proves. I hardly know where to begin -- a Polish film about life in Auschwitz, made less than three years after liberation of the camp, shot on location in Auschwitz itself, using real liberated prisoners as extras, filmed by a woman (female Polish directors in the '40s?) who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz just three years earlier.