The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas reminds us that when youthful minds are still being shaped, they can be poisoned by the evil of the adults they admire.

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11/28/08

While I can't say the film had much emotional impact on me -- I get the point, but it's sloppily executed -- it's definitely an unusual attempt.

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11/27/08

Making a parable out of the Holocaust is a dicey proposition, and here the emotional tugs are so forced that it exploits and trivializes the historical tragedy it claims to be trying to illuminate.

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11/26/08

Even in its lighter moments, the picture never downplays the horror of the situation, and the devastating ending is potent enough to affect even those viewers who write it off as nothing more than a sensationalist stunt.

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11/26/08

Poignant and devastatingly sad - but over-the-top manipulative.

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11/25/08

[What] might easily have been turned into a terrible and tasteless Boy's Adventure in the Holocaust movie... is, instead, a film that you won't soon forget.

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11/21/08

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas fails to illuminate history. Instead, it raises questions about the project itself. As in, who thought this was a good idea?

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11/21/08

The resulting film nicely captures the banality of evil -- at least until overplaying its hand.

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11/21/08

Those problems won't concern anyone caught up, perhaps for the first time, in a story that has the potential to rend any hearts that remain open to it.

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11/21/08

I found the movie impossibly basic and sanitized as a 'never again' parable of the Final Solution -- and simply wrongheaded as a story about children.

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11/21/08

The tropes of the heartwarming indie kids movie get thrown together with the tropes of the low-voltage, war-at-home war drama, and the result is muddled but undeniably affecting

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11/21/08

Perhaps the movie might be most profitably viewed as almost a genre tale: A suspense thriller with a moral to its twist ending, like that old Nazi 'Twilight Zone' episode, but without the supernatural element.

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11/21/08

A beautifully photographed film that hammers home its point (people are essentially good, Nazis are evil) repeatedly and simplistically.

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11/21/08

... a serious and well-made film that does the only moral thing a movie can do when it attempts to confront great evil - it nips off a human-size chunk and doesn't flinch when the horror turns and bares its bloody, brazen maw.

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11/21/08

Either you will appreciate The Boy in the Striped Pajamas particular tact, or you will cringe on what it decides to exploit. Like the subject it secures as part of its plotting, there is no middle ground.

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11/20/08

Writer-director Mark Herman, working from the novel by John Boyne, has created a smart-looking film, but one in which the only thing we learn about the Holocaust is that children were its victims, too.

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11/20/08

This is an assured work, and [director Herman] gets fine performances from his cast.

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11/20/08

The tale takes on the resonance of a Greek myth, and even though the story is fiction it finds devastating truths.

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11/20/08

This story is already a tear-jerker, but the superb acting makes it even more heartfelt

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11/18/08

---- a truly inspirational film ----

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11/14/08