Forty years after the fall of the Third Reich, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann made "Shoah," a 9 1/2-hour documentary about the Holocaust. The film still endures today as the definitive film on Nazism and the death camps.

Lanzmann avoided all cheap shots and easy solutions; he stayed away from historical footage and concentrated on first-person testimonies from survivors and ex-Resistance fighters. Since then a sizable number of filmmakers have in their different ways, approached the atrocious monster of Nazism.

"The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is the latest and U.K. director Mark Herman — working from a novel by John Boyne — puts two young boys in the front line of his project.