Actor Bruno Ganz's humanistic performance in the recent German drama Downfall leads to a single, moral question: How should someone portray Hitler and what should that actor omit or emphasize?

Russian auteur Aleksandr Sokurov answered that question in 1999 with his film Moloch, a breathtaking work of expressionistic art that leaves politics and judgments outside the frame.

It is 1942 and Eva Braun (Elena Rufanova) is waiting for her infamous lover (Leonid Mosgovoi) at an isolated retreat in the Bavarian Alps.

Hitler arrives with Josef Goebbels, his wife Magda and the nervous Martin Bormann, who cautions people from discussing the war in their leader's presence.

Remember: The summer of 1942 is when the war began to be lost for Germany, especially on the Eastern Front.

Mosgovoi and Rufanova are Russian actors dubbed with German voices. As Hitler, Mosgovoi is haggard and old looking.

Berchtesgaden, Hitler's mountain retreat, is just as much a character. Sokurov makes the space into a gloomy fortress clouded in silver blue clouds that pay homage to German expressionism. Berchtesgaden becomes Hamlet's Elsinore and it is meant to be just as foreboding in terms of human tragedy.

Some people consider Moloch inflammatory because of the way it depicts Hitler and Braun, but the film is too operatic; its tale told in broad, stylish strokes, to be dismissed as judgmental in way or the other. One more thing is clear early in the film after Braun berates Hitler: Sokurov is certainly not sympathetic to the Nazi party.

Moloch is a Wagnerian opera set in a stark mountainous retreat with silvery clouds taking the place of arias. Moloch is a fractured love story but it is also much more. And the Rest
Susan Sontag called Sokurov the "savior of serious cinema" and it's easy to see why. His drama Mother and Son is a solemn, Beckett-like drama about a man who carries his dying mother through the woods. His best-known film is Russian Ark, a hypnotic shot in a single unbroken take lasting 90 minutes, following a 19th-century French aristocrat as he walks around the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. But the films that reveal how Sokurov's technical mastery leads to film transcendence are his documentaries Spiritual Voices and Confession (Facets). In Spiritual Voices, Sokurov shows the isolated lives of Russian soldiers stationed along the Tajikistan/Afghanistan border with an intimate knowledge of their loneliness. In Confession, Sokurov follows the captain and crew of a Russian naval ship in the Arctic.

There is political significance among Sokurov's artful military documentaries that speaks to Russia's military mentality. But he leaves such judgments for audiences to decide.