"Benediction," Terence Davies' achingly beautiful portrait of the English war poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, is a movie of acute sadness and intense pleasure. The pleasure and the sadness are inextricable, which seems fitting, given how closely aesthetic bliss and moral despair were entwined in Sassoon's own art. In furious, somber and, yes, frequently thrilling language, he laid bare the horrors of World War I and excoriated the moral blindness of its architects and supporters. His poem "Suicide in the Trenches," first published in 1918, ends with this stinging rebuke:
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
