THE BOXER UNDONE BY HIS SINS

ow that so many books, movies, and TV shows fixate on emotional suffering, many of us are asking: How much is too much? directed by Barry Levinson, tells the real-life story of Harry Haft, played here by Ben Foster, a scrappy light-heavyweight boxer of the late 1940s who did well enough for himself—Rocky Marciano was one of his opponents. But Haft’s story comes with an anguishing twist: a Polish Jew, he’d survived the concentration camps by fighting other prisoners to the death, for the entertainment of their SS overseers. After escaping the camps, Haft tried to build a new life for himself in the U.S., only to be dogged by guilt and, in the movie’s telling, haunted by a lost love.