Mother Night

This stylish adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's novel is an idiosyncratic mix of historical realism, rapt fantasy and offbeat humour. Nolte is Howard W Campbell Jr, an apolitical American playwright in Nazi Germany whose work as a conduit for US intelligence, concealing encoded communiqués in his Jew-baiting broadcasts on German radio, yields widely inspirational Nazi propaganda. Living incognito in New York after the war, his eventual exposure gathers a storm of interested parties - Israeli war-crimes investigators, white supremacists, his supposedly dead wife. An ambivalent meditation on deception, personal responsibility and commitment in an enigmatic world; some may find the studied, circumspect style unaffecting, but there's no denying the fascination of the material.