Pitiless, bleak and despairing -- The Grey Zone refers to a world where everyone is covered with the gray ash of the dead, and it has been like that for so long they do not even notice anymore.

No dramatic feature has ever come quite this close to the matter-of-fact ugliness of the Nazi crimes.

Explores cloudy, discomforting realities of the Holocaust not usually addressed in such films.

Gives life and meaning to an event that is little more than a footnote in history books (if that).

Extremely difficult but worthy film.

Grimly claustrophobic movies can make viewers put up a shield, yet Tim Blake Nelson (who directed O) invests this unusual Holocaust drama with dramatic intensity that in no way cheapens its subject matter.

Should be seen: It's a worthy ordeal, with flaws that, ironically, make grist for later arguments.

It's grim stuff indeed, but somehow the horror never quite overwhelms Nelson's sure-footed approach to raising all manner of frankly unanswerable questions -- in particular, what would or could one have done in such circumstances?

The atmosphere makes a deeper impression than the drama, which might represent a failing on Nelson's part, but could it be avoided? His film portrays the pinholes of light in a place of otherwise unrelenting darkness.

When the larger question cannot be answered, the lesser one -- "What would you have done?" -- seems beside the point.

I would like to be able to report that Nelson's directorial vision is grim and uncompromising. Grim it most surely is. But his movie about morally compromised figures leaves viewers feeling compromised, unable to find their way out of the fog and the ashes.

There are better holocaust dramas than Grey Zone -- "Schindler's List" for one, and due later this year, Roman Polanski's magnificent "The Pianist." But few will disturb you like The Grey Zone -- mostly because it won't try for tears.

It's an intelligent, chilling movie, but one that can't quite shake those stage origins.

Jagged, unrelenting, claustrophobically intimate.