Nick Nolte does his best acting in years as Howard Campbell, an American writer living in Germany during World War II who spies on the Nazis by pretending to be one and ends up confused about good and evil. After all, his sexy German wife, Helga (Sheryl Lee), and her cute sister, Resi (Kirsten Dunst), think his genocidal rap is just dandy.

Welcome to Kurt Vonnegut country as director Keith Gordon (A Midnight Clear) offers his take on the master's risky 1962 novel. There's a reason why Vonnegut's books, Slaughterhouse-Five excepted, aren't filmed: They're a bitch. Credit the fearless Gordon for maintaining Vonnegut's delicate balance of moral gravity and twisted humor. Any movie that has Campbell in prison for war crimes and trading repartee with Adolf Eichmann is a high-wire act. Gordon stumbles along the way, but buoyed by Robert B. Weide's sharp script, Tom Richmond's evocative camera work and a first-rate cast (John Goodman, Alan Arkin and David Strathairn deserve special note), the director comes through with a daring, darkly comic game of Let's Pretend.

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.