Peter Cohen’s film is a brilliant two-hour documentation of the direct if paradoxical connection between beauty and evil in Hitler’s Third Reich. The evil, of course, far surpassed mere damage. Cohen, an award-winning filmmaker born in Sweden to parents who fled from Nazi Germany and Austria, believes that the Nazi horror can be comprehended as a pervasive manifestation of a perverse aesthetic doctrine: to make the world beautiful by doing violence to it. This provocative thesis, systematically explored, gives a compelling pace to the film.

Using archival footage and documents, familiar and unfamiliar, Cohen marshals his arguments and his evidence masterfully. He traces Hitler’s failed career as an artist (and shows us his modest artistic attainments); he links this with the artistic aspirations of other high Nazis; he demonstrates the connection between the Fuehrer’s fascination with Wagner and the spectacular Nazi ceremonies, and between Hitler’s personal taste in art and the vacuous but immense output of artists favored by the regime; he examines the chilling Nazi obsession with personal hygiene, conceived as an antidote to class consciousness; and he notes the crucial early enlistment of the medical profession (45 percent of doctors were party members) in the Nazi cause.

Architecture, strictly speaking, doesn’t play much of a role in the film, although Hitler’s (and Speer’s) megalomaniacal projects are mentioned. But there’s an absorbing photo of Hitler, in February 1945, contemplating a model for the rebuilding of his provincial hometown of Linz, Austria, while the world burned. The conflagration, we understand, was Hitler’s greatest artistic production!

In 1990, two men dressed as cops con their way into a Boston museum and steal a fortune in art.

In the late 1930s, wealthy landowner Edith Pretty hires amateur archaeologist Basil Brown to investigate the mounds on her property in England. He and his team discover a ship from the Dark Ages while digging up a burial ground.

An exploration into the psyche of a former gallery director, Ann Freedman, who was won over by a supposed art dealer. The demise of the esteemed Knoedler Gallery stemmed from the sale of $80 million worth of fraudulent Abstract Expressionist works, and shocked collectors, dealers, and art historians alike.

Archival footage and interviews offer insight into the life and career of Polish painter and sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski.

When a big pair of legs comes to a small town, there is heightened conflict and an array of idiosyncratic characters who reveal their true selves.