'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...