Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

In works like 1998's Midwives, Chris Bohjalian has shown a prodigious gift for exploring how people are transformed by a single horrific and random act. The horror in Skeletons at the Feast is relentless: A Prussian family, the Scottish POW assigned to work on their farm, and a Jew disguised as a Third Reich soldier attempt to escape through the frozen, war-torn tundra of 1945 Germany. Bohjalian's characters are not unappealing, but they are no dramatic match for the constant spectre of death. Ultimately, they become flat clichés amid the terrible din of battle. B-