Overrated

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

wow, that's a 9+ one, story, acting, cinematography , directing, a+. Also, not a bad movie for subtitle reading as the dialogues are kept minimal. whatever genre you like, it is a good movie. Like a user described about 2nd world war in Deutschland, The Occupation was a lot smoother in some aspects then France regarding the nationals, and it bring a different flavor to war movies. It is a very emotional movies . Very recommended. ----- now I just red the negatives reviews, and I agree about the discrepancies in the plots and some situations. I guess I like emotional bs exaggeration and easily disregard illogical things. I will not name them, no need of negative spoilers. like Forest Gump, just let the movie take you for a nice ride.

14 year-old Michiel lives in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation in the latter part of WWII. Although he's still only a kid, he happens upon a downed British flier and bravely decides to help him--even though the expedient thing would have been to stay out of this. To complicate things, Michiel's father is the local mayor--and a man who has long tried to appease his Nazi overlords. What is the boy to do?The film is excellent in every way. Martijn Lakemeier did a great job in the leading role and the film was a quality production throughout. I also appreciated it because the film was very difficult to predict. Sure, you know the Nazis would lose and the war would be over in only a few months--but there were so many twists and turns in the film that it kept me guessing. It helped that this was not a 'happily ever after' sort of family film but a gritty one that was about a boy who needed to grow up very, very fast and make some very adult things. Well worth seeing and a decent film for the family despite its R-rating.

The Dutch had an ambivalent World War II experience, and movies like this one, Black Book, and Soldier of Orange reflect it. The Germans considered them junior Aryans and behaved "correctly" for the most part. There were a fair number of Dutch collaborators. The bureaucracy cooperated, and a much higher percentage of Jews got rounded up in Holland than in Belgium or France. If you weren't a Jew, weren't drafted to work in Germany, and kept your mouth shut, life went on pretty much normally until the Hunger Winter of 44-45, when food and fuel supplies dried up and things got very hard. The Dutch resistance movement was a fiasco; German military intelligence infiltrated, captured and doubled the agents the British parachuted in, and sent a steady stream of false messages to London. Because Holland was off the main Allied route into Germany, most of it wasn't liberated until weeks or days before the end of the war. Their movies tend to present the Dutch experience as mostly civilized middle class people trying to get by, making moral compromises, and not being very good at anything more belligerent or heroic. The center of Winter in Wartime is Mikiel, a 13 year old in rural Overijssel province. His village is a backwater where the German checkpoint at the ferry marches off for a tea break at 3 p.m. every day, allowing people without papers to sneak across. The garrison commander is a fat, overage Captain, and his troops are boys barely out of high school. Mikiel's family are well to do, and his father is the mayor. One of their neighbors is apparently member of the NSB, the Dutch Nazi party. Mikiel is a typical boy of his age: active, curious, and just at the point where his interest is beginning to shift from model airplanes to girls. He zips around on his bike, dodges chores, teases his older sister the nurse, loves the family's riding horse, is fascinated by anything to do with the war and loathes the Germans. With all the moral certainty of a 13 year old, he detests his father, who must deal with them every day. He idolizes his cool bachelor Uncle Ben, who has a beard, a twinkle in his eye, no apparent occupation and something to do with the resistance. We meet Mikiel when he gets into some minor trouble; he's caught when he and his friend try to loot souvenirs from a newly crashed British bomber in the woods, and the German garrison commander releases him to his father. Because he's a boy and the mayor's son, he moves around untouched and unsuspected, so his best friend's older brother, who is involved in the resistance, gives him a message to carry. When the brother is captured and the intended recipient is killed resisting arrest, Mikiel opens the letter, follows it, and finds a British airman from the bomber being hidden in a dugout in the woods with a wounded leg. Jack, the airman, needs to get to a town where he's been told he'll find an escape contact.Mikiel decides that he's going to take care of this all by himself; he'll bring two bikes and some civilian clothes, and when Jack is ready to travel in a few days they'll cross the ferry during the guards' tea break. In the meantime, he'll bring Jack food, hang out, do a little hero worshiping, enjoy his adventure, and feel like he's helping to win the war. But what can go wrong does. The wound gets infected, Jack is too feverish to travel, and Mikiel has to bring his sister out to the woods and let her in on the secret. Within a few days, he finds himself in a very different movie than the one playing in his head -- he's now the Kid Brother in the picture about the Gallant British Pilot and the Pretty Dutch Nurse. He doesn't fully grasp what's going on, but he knows he's got a rival for Jack's attention, and he doesn't like it one bit. So he redoubles his efforts to make himself indispensable. Then things go even more wrong. There's a dead German out in the woods -- Jack had to shoot him to escape capture. The Germans find the body and take civilian hostages to shoot in retaliation for what they think is resistance activity. Mikiel finally realizes he's in over is head and calls in Uncle Ben.There are plenty of exciting narrow scrapes and close calls, not all of which end well. Without giving anything away, I can say that Mikiel's father, his uncle, the pro-Nazi neighbor and the boy himself all turn out to have various qualities that he hasn't imagined. He loses a great deal, including his boyhood illusions, and when the day of liberation arrives he knows a lot more about life but doesn't feel much like celebrating. The peculiarly Dutch irony is that none of it was necessary. The war was almost over, Jack would have been a POW under the Geneva Convention, the liberators would get there sooner or later, and there was no reason for anyone to have stuck their neck out.Every scene is from Mikiel's viewpoint. We see and hear only what he does, although we know a great deal more, both from historical hindsight and from adulthood. Unlike the similarly constructed Boy In Striped Pajamas, though, the script doesn't bludgeon us over the head. It sticks (with a few glitches) to the probable, and it trusts the audience to fill in what Mikiel is thinking and feeling from our own knowledge of life and of history. An American audience unfamiliar with the Dutch World War II experience will miss a good deal, and I'm sure I don't even know what fine points I might have missed. Definitely worth the two hours, though.

Based on the autobiographical novel by Dutch author Jan Terlouw who spent five grim years under Nazi occupation and was arrested several times, Martin Koolhoven's Winter in Wartime is the coming-of-age story of a teenager who becomes involved with the Resistance when he helps a wounded RAF soldier hiding from the Germans. Written by Paul Jan Nelissen and Mieke de Jong and set in January 1945 in a small town in Holland (but filmed in Lithuania), the film is seen from the perspective of 13-year-old Michiel who, in addition to dealing with the normal problems of a teenager, must handle his complex feelings towards his father, the town's mayor, euphemistically called a "neutral" or, more directly, a Nazi collaborator. Michiel is played by Martijn Lakemeier who, despite having acted for only two months prior to the film, does a highly creditable job playing the bright but naïve teen.Though his father, Raymond Thiry (Johan Van Beusekom) has the wounded look of someone just caught stealing, he loves his son and the scene where he teaches him how to shave is genuine and quite touching, though Michiel has little respect for his dad's cozy relationship with the German occupiers. The story becomes more involved when Michiel's Uncle Ben (Yorick van Wageningen) shows up and assumes the role of a mentor to the boy, a status abdicated by his father. Though Ben is protective of Michiel and tries to keep him from getting involved, the boy inadvertently becomes part of the resistance when he finds a British soldier, Jack (Jamie Campbell Bower), hiding in an underground bunker deep in the forest and brings him food and together plan his escape.To add more tension, Michiel recruits his sister Erica (Melody Klaver), a nurse, to care for the wounded flier, a meeting that develops into a personal relationship. As the film moves to an unpredictable climax, it becomes challenging for Michiel to fully grasp where people's loyalties really lie, and this lesson is learned the hard way as part of his maturing process. Winter in Wartime avoids the usual Nazi stereotypes and presents the Germans as human beings, though Koolhoven's even-handedness becomes hard to swallow when "friendly" German soldiers stop to help Michiel and Jack repair the broken wheel of a horse-drawn carriage, not asking who they are or where they are going.Though the film is set in occupied territory in the middle of a war, it lacks a gritty look and feel. Koolhoven makes choices that constantly undermine the film's realism such as Michiel running in slow motion towards a firing squad to try and prevent an execution and a lush musical background of soaring violins that does not seem appropriate to the circumstances. In spite of its flaws, Winter in Wartime is an involving story, well acted, and confidently directed. Though they will learn little about the full extent of Nazi brutality, the film should appeal to students seeking to better understand historical events they have only read about in history texts.