The film is dramatically powerful and Asa Butterfield is charming but this is a very sugar-coated view of the Holocaust. Children this age would almost always have been gassed immediately upon arrival in the death camps, anyone going near the barbed wire would have been shot, and anyone who managed to touch it would have been electrocuted. I don't think little Bruno's supposed pure-hearted bafflement at what's going on around him is all that true to life, either. In the book he comes across as almost imbecilic in his naivety: he doesn't know what "Heil Hitler" means, for instance. Almost no real-life eight-year-old in Nazi Germany could have been as ignorant as that, let alone the child of a high-ranking SS officer. Nor were many children totally ignorant of the murders going on. It's recorded that schoolchildren living near the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre in Hesse, Germany, where the Nazis murdered disabled people, would say of the arriving vans "Here come the murder boxes" and would taunt one another with "You're not very clever; you will go to Hadamar and into the ovens." Films like these may make us feel better about humanity but do they really help us understand it better?

My Movie Rating: 5 / 10

Excellent acting by Asa I'd give it 100/100 if I could very powerful movie.

My Movie Rating: 10 / 10