Rating: 
Summary: YOU WILL BE SURPRISED
Review: It is difficult not to be drawn into this period-perfect, wistful and melancholy film about first love and memory. The performances are wonderful, and the score is achingly sweet. And the European sensibility and sensitivity in handling this truthful relationship will have you nearly breathless in its candor. There is nothing sacrosanct or repulsive or even lecherous about this movie, it just IS. And the performance of the child will haunt you.
Rating: 
Summary: We need responsibilities!
Review: For a movie, the message it carries should overweigh all other elements. I hate to say that the movie is confusing. I never doubt the soldier was in deed love with the boy. However it was never to the best interests of the boy. As we are adults, we have to be true to our feelings, but I find more reasons to be stronger to protect the ones that we love. It happened that the object of affection in the case was a boy, inevitably the adults should take the sole responsiblities.Believe me, if you abandon yourself to such a love, you confuse the child. You leave the child little if not no choice at all for his future preference. It is irresponsible for an adult no matter a man or a woman to violate a child when he is starting to see the world. We must honor their basic rights of making their own judgments when they are up to it. Love is not only lust, and love is not selfish.
Rating:
Summary: An understated, thought provoking movie.
Review: A story of friendship and love crossing taboo sex and age boundaries, made magnificent by it's gentle and mysterious handling of the subject matter. Critics have all too often taken a generalised view of the story and dismissed it as a paedophelic adventure; in reality it offers a glimpse into the lives of two lost, very different people both in need of comfort, their ages betraying biased assumptions on their wants and needs. Excellent.
Rating: 
Summary: The circumstances of friendship, sex and love
Review: Some will believe the topic of the man/boy "relationship" is impossible, or crude, or criminal. Other's will not understand it. But examine the circumstances of the setting. WAR. A young boy away from his family. A young soldier fighting in a war. The question that came to my mind was: who was less prepared for their circumstances?? Was the young Canadian soldier more out of his element in war or was the young boy out of his element in a relationship? Who was more scared? Who needed to reach out for a relationship more? My best guess would be the soldier. The boy almost took on the role of being the one who looked out for the needs of the soldier. This was simply a very powerful movie--I loved it.
Rating:
Summary: How many words are there for Wonderful?
Review: Well, gay cinema is all about depressing reality lately, or so it seems. I was so happy to see a film that first off, told the truth and secondly, did it in a manner that left you smiling at the end. So rare is this in film that I'm recommending this film to everyone I know. Yes, there is man/boy love as a plot element. I don't know where this one star rater (I refer to a previous reviewer) grew up, but almost all the gay men I know have had one relationship at least that has had a generational gap. Society won't teach us about ourselves, so other men do. I'm not scarred for life. Neither was this dancer. I know of no gay men who are irrevocably hurt by this experience, if they are hurt at all. It's the truth, and refreshing, if somewhat unsettling to see. Huzzah to the film-makers!
Rating:
Summary: excellent rememberance of first love
Review: This is a terrific movie which I speculatively purchased earlier this year. I liked the movie so much that I am now interested in reading the autobiography upon which it was based as well. Superb acting and settings which convincingly conveys to the viewer the last days of WWII in Holland. The liberation and its impact on a young, impressionable but displaced boy and a tenderhearted Canadian soldier is moving. Both temporarily find companionship with each other dispite language and cultural barriers. The soldier's abrupt departure is unsettling but realistic given the wartime setting. You share the boy's turmoil about losing his most intimate friend. His reflections, as a man, on his boyhood experience also creates a desire to learn what happened to the soldier once he returned to the battlefield. This movie cries out for good sequels; one on the boy's teenage/adult life and one on the Canadian soldier's life, if any, after the war.
Rating:
Summary: An uplifting version of a true-life "downer" book.
Review: This film, based on the autobiographical book of the same title, is thankfully more upbeat. A boy from war-torn Amsterdam struggles to cope with being in a new environment, with identifying with the men around him, and with his feelings of love and attraction toward a Canadian soldier. Told in retrospect, a ballet choreographer looks back on his first love; this film is pederastic, yet posi- tive in how the relationship affected the young- ster. Acting is top notch, direction is spare, focusing on events rather than inner motivation. This film cried for a sequel -- Jeroen as a teen, becoming a dancer, internalising the war's end, finding his next lover, etc. Nudity is slight, and in context; obscenities are also rare, and superfluous; no violence per se. In Dutch, with subtitles, and English.
Rating:
Summary: Pedophilia is not romantic
Review: This movie, although intentions may have been good, is patently false in it premise that an adult can have a sexual and romantic relationship with a child, period. Children, however mature they may seem, cannot grasp the fullness and extrapolation of both sexuality and romantic or passionate love. It is wrong to take this film as anything other than a cultural farce.
Rating:
Summary: Bittersweet. Even the young have heartbreak
Review: I wasn't expecting much of this film but I was delightfully mistaken. Sad yet heartwarming. This could never be made in the USA. Too much truth.
Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly beautiful
Review: The plot in this movie is very simple: a man revisits his childhood home only to relive the memory of his first love. The twist in this is that the first love we are talking about is a Canadian soldier in the aftermath of WWII when the narrator was just a teenage boy in rural Holland. ~[Gulp]~ Extremely well written and acted. The tender relationship between the protagonists is dealt with in a very mature and serene fashion, devoid of our American Puritanism. Jeroen and Walt obviously need each other at a time when the world is falling apart and they develop a comradeship that turns into a love which is never made to seem dirty, perverted or wrong. A pioneering effort. Leave it to the Dutch to be so civilized.
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