The Lives of Others, the celebrated German film that was awarded this year’s Oscar for best foreign film, offers an examination of the life of the artist under a systematically repressive regime, the German Democratic Republic, which fell with the Berlin Wall in 1989. Its director, the aristocratically monikered Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, has skillfully rendered an increasingly tense and involving drama of secrets, cruelly suppressed humanity, and courage. But its considerable appeal may obscure the film’s suppositions and forestall a consideration of them.

As you may be wondering, the title does indeed come from the song by the Who (who spelled it “Love, Reign O’er Me,” but why tick off the guys who put the letters up on movie marquees with extra punctuation?) Providing a stormy resolution to the end of Quadrophenia, Peter Townsend’s massively ambitious four-sided album, the song is nothing if not dramatic, almost risibly so if you listen to it out of context. We are therefore forewarned that this is going to be a movie with Very Large Dramatic Ambitions—which may not be what you expect out of an Adam Sandler movie.