Two quick things I have to say about Giulio Ricciarelli’s engaging historical drama Labyrinth of Lies. One, it is set in the late-1950s and is about a young and dashing prosecutor, Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling), who to his amazement and deep distress discovers that his country, Germany, has not confronted, and is in fact ignoring, its recent Nazi past.

He also soon realizes that everyone around him (his father, his lover and her father, his close friend, his boss, some baker across the road, and so on) participated in one of the biggest crimes of the 20th century: the robbery, enslavement, and mass murder of European Jews.

The second thing about the film is it can be seen as a prequel to Hannah Arendt, a 2012 biopic about the German Jewish philosopher and her controversial response to the trail of the former Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Where Labyrinth of Lies ends, Arendt pretty much begins, and both films are very similar in mood and style and content. Lies, however, has a sex scene that could have been cut.