Political scientist and Holocaust survivor Arendt was a respected New York intellectual in 1961 when she attended Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem; her series of reports for the New Yorker on the Nazi war criminal’s “banality of evil” soon engulfed her in a bitter, long-lingering controversy. In this fourth fruitful collaboration with director Margarethe von Trotta (Rosa Luxemburg), Barbara Sukowa delivers a beautifully modulated performance, showing the rigor of Arendt’s thought and convictions while revealing the contours of a passionate woman with complex relationships. Evincing an eye for period detail and an admirable sensitivity, von Trotta traces the postwar dilemmas for Jews tasked with looking back at the Shoah, and forward to rebuilding a people. In English and subtitled German and Hebrew.