Aleksei Kravchenko gives one of the most emotionally demanding child performances of all time in this astonishingly brutal war film from director Elem Klimov, a surrealistic nightmare of death and destruction, as determined Kravchenko, a new recruit in the Russian Resistance of WWII, wanders from place to place as the SS annihilates everything, and everyone, in their path. Klimov films in impossibly long sequence takes, using a Stedi-Cam to float through the devastation as in a waking nightmare, and what we see, either as direct point-of-view shots from the boy, or shots looking back in his direction, is a complete examination of the brutality and comprehensive evil of the Nazi war machine, and in this boy, who starts the proceedings 12, but 130 minutes later looks like he’s 70, a strength of will and determination that’s both inspiring and heartbreaking. If the film is hard to take, and about the time the SS firebombs a barn full of women and children, its horror is almost numbing, that’s the point; there’s no artificial happiness in a holocaust, and Klimov, who would never again make another movie after this, stating he had said everything he needed to say with this one deeply personal masterpiece, looks at the devastation and finds, in the boy’s painfully expressive eyes, a humanist’s spirit.