Lady Vengeance

In The Nightingale, the director of The Babadook returns with a tale of real-life monsters.

- David Edelstein

A SOCIETY IS MEASURED by how it treats its most vulnerable, which is why images of suffering or injured children feature so prominently in accounts of human-rights abuses: Even the most calloused or bigoted onlooker has a tough time saying, “Well, they brought this on themselves.” (Offered an opportunity to scold kids in cages at the border, our vice-president opted to blame the Democrats.) Deaths of children are at the heart of two graphically violent new movies, Jennifer Kent’s Australian-frontier revenge thriller, The Nightingale, and Waad al- Kateab and Edward Watts’s first-person documentary of the siege of Aleppo, For Sama—Sama being Waad’s baby daughter, whose existence haunts Waad as she films her husband (one of the few doctors remaining in East Aleppo) attempting to save yet another bomb-mangled child. In their vastly different ways, both films imply that to look away from the atrocities onscreen would be an act of historical cowardice. They shame you into bearing witness for the sake of the children.