Los Angeles Times

Review: German art, history and politics come together in the moving, layered 'Never Look Away'

"Never Look Away," an absorbing and ruminative new drama from the German writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, begins in Dresden in 1937. The world is about to tilt into madness, a condition that seems to manifest itself early on in the brave, troubled mind of a young woman named Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl). Her nephew, an aspiring painter named Kurt (Cai Cohrs), walks in to find her playing the piano in the nude; when he flinches, she tells him, "Never look away. Everything that's true is beautiful."

The movie certainly makes its own case for beauty, evident in the crisp, gleaming frames of Caleb Deschanel's cinematography

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