I can only think of one word to describe this movie...

Rating: 10/10 (13 March 2006)

Incredible.
This movie is about a young boy who must live through WWII on his own in an interment camp and the way the story is told is so moving that I doubt anyone could ever forget it. When I first saw it I was very young, probably too young to really understand war and death, but the movie stuck with me. It was incredible seeing this young boy, raised with every advantage in the world, thrown into such a complex situation without anything to fall back onto. He has to grow up in an unforgiving world, desperately trying to hold onto the memory of his parents.
The acting in this movie is incredible, features veterans like John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson and Joe Pantoliano and a then new-comer Christian Bale. It's actually hard to just call it 'acting', because their performances feel so real. The direction is incredible, it's a side of Steven Spielberg we'll probably never see again, mixing real-life with a child's view of the war so seamlessly that you barely notice you're being shown a skewed look at reality. A reality created in an attempt to deal with the devastation of war.
This is probably the best movie I have ever seen, about war, about childhood, about life, about anything.
Incredible.