More about The Boy In The Striped Pajamas
Wilmington on Movies: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
By Michael Wilmington
Movie City News
Excerpt
November 8, 2008
A movie adapted from a children's book set in the Holocaust sounds like a risky proposition - though teenager Anne Frank's Diary remains our best-loved chronicle of that tragic, bloody period. But Mark Herman's film of John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas dodges most of the traps and wins most of its bets. The film shines a light upon a significant area of that awful darkness.
It's an engrossing, sometimes powerful work. Not too sentimental, not too horrific, it suggest the enormity of a whole cultural bloodbath by keeping us mostly at the edges, on the perimeter, observing the horrors of an Auschwitz through the eyes of an innocent: an inquisitive but "protected" boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), eight-year-old son of the camp commander (David Thewlis)...
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