The movie on that list you probably haven’t heard about is writer-director Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s “Aftermath” – but you definitely would have if you lived in Poland, where the picture has provoked outrage from right-wing nationalists. But not all coincidence is random, and it’s human nature to see patterns in events we do not understand. On one level, it’s just a coincidence of the calendar that “Ender’s Game” and “12 Years a Slave” and the Matthew McConaughey AIDS drama “Dallas Buyers Club” and the Polish thriller “Aftermath” are all hitting at the same time, all of them, in very different ways, posing thorny questions about how we deal with traumatic events of the past. Which, for the record, is straightforward, a bit literal-minded, very faithful to the book and largely compelling. We seem greatly preoccupied with issues of historical guilt and historical reckoning these days, issues that lie at the heart of Orson Scott Card’s tangled science-fiction masterwork “Ender’s Game” and the long-awaited movie version from writer and director Gavin Hood.
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