Three of the year's best American movies — "Citizenfour," "Inherent Vice" and "Whiplash" — aren't yet available for streaming on demand. Still, many other worthy U.S. films from 2014 are on VOD, led by "Boyhood" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel."

Also available are a half-dozen foreign-language essentials, including Claude Lanzmann's "The Last of the Unjust," an epic documentary built on outtakes from the French director's monumental "Shoah."

Lanzmann draws extensively from 1975 interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last and only surviving president of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto, located in what is now the Czech Republic, during World War II.

In the four-hour film, Murmelstein, who was accused of being a Nazi collaborator, calls himself both a "calculating realist" — one who managed to prevent the liquidation of the Theresienstadt death camp while helping more than 120,000 Jews leave the country — and a "marionette that had to pull his own strings."

Although Lanzmann occasionally argues during the interviews that his subject is "sidetracking," the film ultimately emerges as a tale of two men valiantly working — sometimes tussling — to establish a vital historical record. "The Last of the Unjust" also includes contemporary images of a cantor delivering the first prayer of Yom Kippur, shots of haunting eyewitness sketches by Jewish artists who buried their work underground and portions of a tattered black-and-white Nazi propaganda film of the camp — the "model ghetto" — showing children eating buttered bread, women reading and weaving and men playing chess. ("Use of free time is left to the individual," says the narrator.)

Lanzmann's film is streamable via Netflix, as are three other great foreign films released this year.

Set in the early 1960s and stunningly shot in black and white (and the nearly square aspect ratio of yore), the Polish "Ida" concerns a young woman (Agata Trzebuchowska) whose plans to become a nun are interrupted by the news that her parents were Jewish.

Shot in Nepal, the documentary "Manakamana" follows a group of pilgrims preparing to worship at the temple of the title, while the four-hour "Norte, the End of History," from the Philippines, deals with a law student's murder of two people and the consequences to his family.

Send questions or comments to Rob Nelson at VODcolumn@gmail.com.

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