Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us.
When his family moves from their home in Berlin to a strange new house in Poland, young Bruno befriends Shmuel, a boy who lives on the other side of the fence where everyone seems to be wearing striped pajamas. Unaware of Shmuel's fate as a Jewish prisoner or the role his own Nazi father plays in his imprisonment, Bruno embarks on a dangerous journey inside the camp's walls.
- Harm to children
- Bleak ending
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Grave, earnest, overwhelming and classical in form.
- gravecomic
- earnestironic
- cooloverwhelming
- classical in formformally daring
- warmbleak
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Reviews on TMDB
Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Tastebuds's numbers.
- badelfon TMDB · Sep 20262/10
**Summary: 2/10: well-acted, handsomely made, and morally inverted, a film so intent on manufacturing sympathy for a commandant's family that it forgets, or worse, quietly excuses, whose deaths it was supposed to be mourning.** I haven't read John Boyne's novel, so I can't tell you where the book's failures end and the film's begin. I can only tell you what arrived on screen, and what arrived on screen is a Holocaust memory film that gets the craft right and the moral geometry catastrophically wrong. The acting is not the problem. Asa Butterfield is believable as a bored, incurious eight-year-old; David Thewlis plays the commandant with the kind of clipped, unbothered domesticity that should be chilling; Vera Farmiga does real work with a woman coming apart. Mark Herman's direction is competent, the production values are handsome, the Hungarian locations convincingly evoke the machinery of the camp. None of that is in question. What's in question is the premise itself, and premises are not neutral. The film asks us to believe that the wife and children of an Auschwitz-adjacent commandant would not know, would not smell it, would not hear it, would not notice the smoke or the silenc
Read the whole review on TMDB - r96skon TMDB · Jun 20248/10
Not convinced this is a greatly made movie, but it sure does pack a punch! <em>'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'</em> makes for good viewing for the majority, though that ending really is quite something - startling in fact, and that's even with me sensing it. The aforementioned is because, as well as the way the film builds in general, I'm pretty certain I watched this at high school; just not sure if it was snippets or the whole thing, the fence scenes are the only ones I vaguely recall seeing. The low acting level of the youngsters did take me out a bit, no dislike to Asa Butterfield and Jack Scanlon, obviously, but they aren't the best. Though they aren't helped by the dialogue for them, which doesn't feel natural at all. It's written in a way that is simply to tell the viewer about what's happening. The adult actors are great, though. Vera Farmiga stands out, though David Thewlis, Rupert Friend and David Hayman merit a mention too. All in all, it's a good film - and one that is distressingly unforgettable thanks to that one moment.
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Cast
- Asa ButterfieldBruno
- Vera FarmigaMother
- David ThewlisFather
- Rupert FriendLieutenant Kotler
- David HaymanPavel
- Jack ScanlonShmuel
- Amber BeattieGretel
- Sheila HancockGrandma
- Richard JohnsonGrandpa
- Zac Mattoon O'BrienLeon
Crew
- Mark HermanDirector
- Mark HermanScreenplay
- John BoyneNovel
- Benoît DelhommeDirector of Photography
- James HornerOriginal Music Composer
- Michael EllisEditor
- David HeymanProducer
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