Please welcome guest contributor J.B.

When I saw The Aftermath, the latest from Testament of Youth director James Kent, starring Kiera Knightley, Jason Clarke and Alexander Skarsgård, last weekend, I was seated next to an older man with a notepad who I assumed was a journalist. I chatted briefly with him before the film started, and when the lights went up and the credits began to roll, I asked him what he thought. His response: “I interviewed her [Knightley] when she did Atonement with James McAvoy. She was so good in that.”

That's a pretty fair takeaway from The Aftermath, which casts Knightley as Rachel, a bereaved military wife recently arrived in Hamburg in 1946 to join her estranged husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke), an officer in the British Army tasked with overseeing the rebuilding of the war-torn city and ferreting out any remaining Nazi-sympathizers...