José Padilha’s lacerating Tropa de Elite, which took the top prize at Berlin, studies the mind of BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion) officer Nascimento. We hear his recollective voiceover. Nascimento (meaning, in Portuguese, birth), an officially sanctioned torturer and terrorist, possesses a flat, affectless voice that claims moral purity; superior, Nascimento equates “thugs”—drug lords and […]

Julie Walters gives a ferocious performance—possibly her finest—as Bernie McPhelimy, an ordinary person who in the early 1970s becomes an activist for peace in Catholic West Belfast, Northern Ireland. Anne Devlin’s fine script adapts Mary Costello’s novel based on the activities of her own mother and others, who are fed up with their neighborhood’s being […]