Absolutely awful and a waste of movie money

Rating: 1/10 (23 November 2008)

So the movie is about a time in the war as seen through the eyes of a child? Then why is he absent from key parts of the movie and why do we know so much he does not?
It appears the only thing that scares our 8-year-old are Nazis. He lies openly to his mother and shows disdain for his sister and tutor but fears men, including his father, when they are dressed as Nazis. Does the writer have some unresolved parent/child thing going on?
The family has some very contemporary dynamics going on it: a child who enters a room where his parents are fighting and without knocking first is reasoned with and not punished for doing so. According to authors such as Alice Miller in the 1940s Germany such a child would have been instantly and severely punished as would he would have been for repeatedly disobeying his parents.
In Auschwitz, at the height of the Final Solution, children were gassed when they arrived and not housed with their parents. In addition, are my partner and I the only ones who noticed Schmule is the only child in the camp? Also, the building the prisoners are working on never gets any further along in completion although we see them working on it through out the movie. Also, where are the guards who have been patrolling the perimeter?
The movie uses cheap tricks including misleading promos, melodramatic music and totally unrealistic situations (e.g. a child burrowing under a fence to get into a death camp) to heighten what could have extremely painful moments.
Redeeming qualities of the movie include excellent acting and some very nicely furnished houses.