When his family moves from their home in Berlin to a strange new house in Poland, young Bruno befriends Shmuel, a boy who lives on the other side of the fence where everyone seems to be wearing striped pajamas. Unaware of Shmuel's fate as a Jewish prisoner or the role his own Nazi father plays in his imprisonment, Bruno embarks on a dangerous journey inside the camp's walls.
"Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us."
Top Billed Cast
Asa Butterfield
Bruno
Vera Farmiga
Mother
David Thewlis
Father
Jack Scanlon
Shmuel
Amber Beattie
Gretel
Rupert Friend
Lieutenant Kotler
David Hayman
Pavel
Sheila Hancock
Grandma
Detailed Critic & Audience Reviews
R r96skVerified TMDB Critic
2024-06-11
Not convinced this is a greatly made movie, but it sure does pack a punch!
<em>'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'</em> makes for good viewing for the majority, though that ending really is quite something - startling in fact, and that's even with me sensing it. The aforementioned is because, as well as the way the film builds in general, I'm pretty certain I watched this at high school; just not sure if it was snippets or the whole thing, the fence scenes are the only ones I vaguely recall seeing.
The low acting level of the youngsters did take me out a bit, no dislike to Asa Butterfield a...
B badelfVerified TMDB Critic
2026-09-10
**Summary: 2/10: well-acted, handsomely made, and morally inverted, a film so intent on manufacturing sympathy for a commandant's family that it forgets, or worse, quietly excuses, whose deaths it was supposed to be mourning.**
I haven't read John Boyne's novel, so I can't tell you where the book's failures end and the film's begin. I can only tell you what arrived on screen, and what arrived on screen is a Holocaust memory film that gets the craft right and the moral geometry catastrophically wrong.
The acting is not the problem. Asa Butterfield is believable as a bored, incurious...
