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Monday nights are starting to be my movie night out while my wife runs her Creative Memories scrapbooking workshops at our home.

This week I saw The Lives of Others, winner of yesterday’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. This claustrophobic story about Wiesler (a top East German Stasi officer), Dreyman (a prominent law-abiding playwright), and Sieland (a leading stage actress and Dreyman’s lover) begins in East Germany a few years before the wall came down and ends a few years after. When Wiesler is assigned to spy on Dreyman for a party official, both become enmeshed in a drama which eventually places all three at odds with the state. Significantly ratcheting up the suspense is the ever-present paranoia — experienced by both Stasi and their prey — of life in East Germany.

The acting, especially that of Ulrich Mühe, who plays Wiesler, is outstanding. Mühe is able to portray Wiesler’s awakening human emotions while somehow maintaining the cold, emotionless facade necessary for his job.

Both a remarkable character study as well as a political thriller — replacing the physical violence of a Bourne Identity with subterfuge and an omnipresent threat of physical and psychological violence — this film is a slow burn gripper. Highly recommended.

I regularly follow A.O. Scott’s movie reviews in The New York Times (here is his review), but if you’d like to see a more comprehensive list of reviews for any particular movie, check out Rotten Tomatoes (and here are those other reviews).