Don't be late for the German film "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days." In the opening scene, twenty-one year old Sophie (Julia Jentsch) listens to pop music with a girl friend. They hover over the record player and happily sing the English lyrics out loud. The song ends, unfortunately, and though it's already late at night, Sophie rushes to a meeting of the White Rose, the underground resistance movement that created political leaflets to spread the word of atrocities committed by the Third Reich. The year is 1943. In those brief seconds, which form the backdrop to the credits, we have witnessed Sophie's very last lighthearted moment.

The next morning, Sophie and her older brother Hans, a soldier returning from the front, head to their college campus to clandestinely distribute the subversive pamphlets. The scene is both tense and triumphant; the enormity of the risk they are taking is implicitly understood--Germans crossing the Gestapo during the war. After the last pile of strident, anti-Nazi literature has been placed on the banister of the building's top floor, the bell rings. In a beautifully filmed shot, an exhilarated Sophie knocks the pamphlets into the air, from where they flutter artfully downward into the building's main atrium while students suddenly crowd the halls.

Later, when she is being interrogated by an SS officer, Sophie will claim she had no idea what the fliers said. "I am a prankster," she explains, impressively managing to convince her interrogator of her innocence. Indeed, the siblings blend successfully into the crowd initially, barely able to suppress their grins--until they are singled out by an observant janitor.

Based on a true story, the film won Best Director for Marc Rothemund and Best Actress for the marvelous Julia Jentsch at the 2005 Berlin Festival, and it is nominated for Best Foreign Film at this year's Oscars. Two other films have been made about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose resistance group: Michael Verhoeven's "The White Rose" and Percy Adlon's "The Last Five Days," both from 1982. Rothemund's interpretation of events benefits from the original minutes of the Gestapo interrogations, which were only made public in 1990. Shot nearly word for word from these transcripts, the scenes between Scholl and officer Robert Hohl (Alexander Held) are the film's most powerful.

"Sophie Scholl: The Last Days" is a traditional and competently made film; Jentsch's steely performance is brilliant. The composure of twenty-one year old Sophie Scholl boggles the mind. Not just her life, but the lives of her friends and family are at stake, and yet she manages to lie with great ease and intelligence. In the presence of formidable Nazi authority, she does not break down. In the single instance Hohl witnesses tears, Sophie has a ready explanation. For the last five days of her life (the title, of course, gives her well-documented fate away), Sophie wears a red cardigan sweater, a neat blouse and skirt, knee socks and Oxford shoes. She looks like the school girl that she is. To see her in these clothes, day after day, is heartbreaking.