Edges of the Lord Tom Smith

This is a pretty good movie about a Jewish Polish boy sent by his parents to live with a Catholic peasant family to hide from the Nazis.  I will watch anything with Willem DaFoe in it.   It might seem too sweet for a Holocaust movie, but on the other hand, if one reflects on the events of the movie, it is not so sweet at all.  The villagers murder and rape each other, the Nazis are predictably sadistic, and that things turn as well as they do, which is only a highly qualified well, is as much due to luck and determination to survive, as it is to any notion that good inevitably triumphs.  I think the slightly syrupy feel of the movie may be due mostly to the soundtrack.  If you think about the film’s depictions of some children being horribly evil while other children are ineffably good, I don’t think the movie is syrupy at all, even if oddly, some of the production values and sweet violins make it seem so.  It deserves its R rating, however, for intense, if not particularly graphic violence, and a non-graphic, but still quite disturbing rape scene.