Phoenix (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Description This evocative and haunting drama, set in a rubble-strewn Berlin in 1945, is like no other film about post World War II Jewish identity.

After surviving Auschwitz, a former cabaret singer (A Most Wanted Man s Nina Hoss, in a dazzling, multilayered performance), her face disfigured and reconstructed, returns to her war-ravaged hometown to seek out the gentile husband who may or may not have betrayed her to the Nazis.

Without recognizing her, he enlists her to play his wife in a bizarre hall-of-shattered-mirrors story that s as richly metaphorical as it is preposterously engrossing.

Revenge film or tale of romantic reconciliation? One doesn t know until the superb closing scene of this marvel from Christian Petzold (the Oscar-nominated Barbara), perhaps the most important figure in contemporary German cinema.