I'll Second That

Rating: 9/10 (9 November 2008)

The Edge-4 pretty much said it all in his review here: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a well-crafted, unsentimental take on the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old German boy, who happens to be the son of a newly installed concentration camp commander. It is more, however. It is a morality play about the development in the boy of a moral sense and the loss of that sense in nearly all the other German male characters, military and civilian alike. So it tackles the plight of six million Jews from both points of view, that of the victims and of the society from which their oppressors sprang. Unlike one reviewer, I didn't see the fast-paced ending coming, and that ending made an already fine film excellent and memorable.
To add a footnote to what others here have said, the period costumes and sets were enjoyable without being overdone, the casting (especially of the boy Shmuel) was first-rate, and the score was perfectly reminiscent of Brahms' German Requiem, an appropriate touch in this requiem for two peoples.
Don't hesitate to see it.