Film adaptations of Martin Amis’s novels have never had cause to grow “tired of winning,” as Trump once put it. That is, until now. Loosely based on Amis’s 2014 novel and directed by Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest takes place in a concentration camp and is told exclusively from the Nazi perspective. Glazer takes the phrase “loose adaptation” and runs with it, disposing of Amis’s fictional trinity of monologues and setting his zone of interest squarely upon real-life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife, Hedwig, and their petty marital strife. In a season of films epic in length and impregnability, The Zone of Interest is mesmerizingly succinct at under two hours. The Nazis are shown to be as human as we are—with careerist ambition, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses hauteur—and thus all the more monstrous. That the most heinous crime in human history was undertaken by bureaucratic mediocrities and shallow wives leaves one contemplating just how many degrees of separation might exist between us and them. —Vincenzo Barney