Based on Yoram Kaniuk’s 1968 novel, this astonishingly vivid film from director Paul Schrader features a tour-de-force performance from Jeff Goldblum, who plays Adam Stein, a former Berlin magician and charismatic circus impresario who survived the Holocaust by using his skills as an entertainer. Set in Israel in 1961, at a remote rehabilitation outpost for Holocaust survivors in the Negev Desert, the film is punctuated by beautifully shot black-and-white flashbacks to Adam’s younger days, first as a successful cabaret performer and later as a prisoner, along with his beloved wife and daughters, at the Stellring concentration camp. Entertainer, clairvoyant, sophisticate and lothario, Stein is haunted by his experiences under the camp’s sadistic commandant (Willem Dafoe), who remembered Adam’s nightclub from before the war, and his moods swing from brilliance to madness. He appears to have everyone stymied and overawed, but an unusual new patient seems to have the magnetic power to break him free from the past. This is a haunting drama of Holocaust memories.