The Nobel-prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) go on an unsentimental journey in 1949 through West and East Germany in Pawel Pawlikowski’s damn-near perfect period piece Fatherland .

Told with exacting restraint yet as layered as the lacquer on an ebony Biedermeier console, this forms a loose triptych with Pawlikowski’s last two features, Ida and Cold War , both of which were set at least partly behind the Iron Curtain . As with its predecessors, the characters here go through the ringers of personal crises, with extra rolling pressure applied by the politics of the times.…