The icy but affecting German drama Before The Fall takes place largely in a "Napola," a rigorous academy for Nazi Germany's elite soldiers and athletes, designed to train the country's next generation of political and military leaders. The Napola school seems equally designed to single out and punish freethinkers and the weak, to ferret out poets, bed-wetters, and sensitive, delicate souls who let their consciences get in the way of blind obedience to authority. It's a system so ruthlessly efficient and efficiently ruthless that it doesn't even have to go about the dirty business of destroying non-conformists directly. All it has to do is create an appropriately unbearable climate of fear, shame, and intimidation, then provide those who either can't or won't get with the program with the means to destroy themselves. A sort of cross between A Separate Peace and Full Metal Jacket, Before The Fall is a coming-of-age story about a working-class boxer who over the course of the film evolves from a blind follower to a man of conscience.