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'Sarah's Key' unlocks a Holocaust horror

Based on the real and underreported roundup of more than 13,000 French Jews in Paris in 1942, Sarah's Key occasionally drifts into melodrama. But this adaptation of Tatiana de Rosnay's best seller has the subtle power of The Lives of Others , the 2006 Oscar-winning drama about a couple who struggle against government intrusion.

Seen largely through the eyes of 10-year-old Sarah (a fierce and stoic Mélusine Mayance), Sarah's Key begins with Sarah hiding her younger brother in a secret cupboard as she and her mother are whisked from their home and held with thousands of others in Paris' cycling stadium.

The real-life event is depicted here like a documentary. Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner does nothing to sensationalize the roundup, which occurred just before citizens were herded to camps. Unsanitary and overcrowded, the Velodrome reeks of death, current and coming.

Paquet-Brenner keeps events from getting too maudlin by focusing much of his film on Sarah, who is still too young to know the nightmare to which she has awakened. One scene, in which Sarah and another girl escape the camp by skipping through a field of wheat, is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.

The film flashes decades forward to find journalist Julia Jarmond (a terrific Kristin Scott Thomas) in Paris to do a story on what became known as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup.

Jarmond discovers more than she bargained for. Thomas, who is bilingual, commands the screen as an American reporter who becomes as obsessed with her story as Sarah was with her brother. And the coincidences and sermons pile on a little thick in the third act.

But Sarah's Key is, for the most part, an exercise in reserve. We never see Hitler, never enter battle. Paquet-Brenner ( Pretty Things , Walled In ), rightly tells his Holocaust story as it now lives: through survivors and descendants. But even those accounts, Key posits, can open difficult doors.

The Weinstein Co. Grabs 'Untouchable' | The Wrap Movies

The Weinstein Company has acquired the French language movie "Untouchable" -- and the rights to remake it in English, the studio announced Friday.

It's the kind of movie the Weinstein Co. loves: an improbable tale -- based on actual events -- of the friendship between Philippe, a wealthy paraplegic, and Driss, the street tough he hires to help him negotiate life.

The deal gives the Weinstein Company rights in North America, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, South Africa and China and distribution rights for pan-Asian satellite television.

Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache directed the movie, which stars Francois Cluzet ("In the Beginning," "Tell No One") as Philippe and Omar Sy ("Those Happy Days") as Driss.

The Weinstein Co. expects to release the movie in the U.S. in 2012.

Quad Films produced "Untouchable" and the Weinstein Co. acquired it from Gaumont.

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