One of the last great New York nights was the opening of The Girl from North Country on Broadway, nearly a month ago. Among the guests crowding into the Belasco was Jesse Eisenberg. By coincidence I had just that afternoon seen his latest film Resistance, and still recovering from the power of this Holocaust survival drama based on the true story of the world’s most famous mime, Marcel Marceau, I stopped him to applaud his performance as a rescuer of orphans during that brutal time. “Oh, was it okay?” he asked, having not yet seen it. “It meant a lot for me. My family came from Lublin.”

Because the movie is set in the South of France in Strasbourg, the chief Nazi villain is Klaus Barbie, known for outrageous cruelty, that is, the torture of his captives for pleasure. Dubbed “the Butcher of Lyons,” the movie’s merciless Barbie (Matthias Schweighofer), a handsome Aryan, descends upon a corps of homosexual Nazis on a night out. But that is just a taste of this true-life character, whose outsized violence escalates to barbaric heights in yet another scene, all the more horrible left to the imagination as Barbie describes what he will do to a captured young Resistance fighter. The memory of the terrified woman strapped into a doctor’s chair, her sister forced to watch, leaves a profound chill. It’s a moment of thrilling movie-making from writer/director Jonathan Jakubovicz.

Needless to say, Jesse Eisenberg is mesmerizing as a mime, his body all controlled elasticity as he lightens up the traumatized children; he studied mime to play this role. The film also features his romance with Emma (an excellent Clemence Poesy), cameos by Edgar Ramirez, Geza Rohrig, and Ed Harris as General Patton, plus a scenic but perilous trip over the Alps, as if that escape had been played out in The Sound of Music. Even as some survived, Holocaust history is such that celebration remains tentative.

You can watch Resistance, already out, on VOD. And this being a week of Holocaust Remembrance, and the holiday of Passover (to be feted at a distance), look out for a postHolocaust era film The Last Vermeer, whose opening date is put off as the COVID-19 virus uproots our world. That film features a charming performance by Guy Pearce as an art forger