Okay, like, wow. How the fuck did this movie get made, and how the fuck did it get on this list.

Like, at a base level, it’s structurally nonsensical — there’s a “present day” (aka late 1940s) story and the Holocaust story, and neither of them really sensibly comments on or casts fresh light on the other.

Really, it’s almost obscene in its use of the Holocaust as a plot element. Like most notably, the Holocaust survivor in the movie is a blond-haired non-Jewish woman. And this is not even a weird oversight — the author of the book the movie is adapted from (who, btw, also wrote that offensive Nat Turner book, so he’s a total peach) had an explicit goal to remind people that the Holocaust affected Christians, and that it was just a generalized evil and not an anti-Semitic thing particularly, which yeah. Even then beyond that, it doesn’t trust the Holocaust to be bad enough on its own without throwing six levels of ridiculous bullshit personal tragedies on top of it.

And even then it relegates all that to the background story as just a setup for the present-day stuff. Because that (and plus also a good ol’ offensive case of movie mental illness that introduces its own pile of tragedies to a movie that seemed like it already had plenty) is just the backdrop to the coming of age story for our would-be writer protagonist, and the real climax of the movie, so to speak, is when he gets to have sex. This whole elaborate tragedy soup of Holocaust backstory and domestic violence murder-suicide is just his “man, I had some really wild roommates this one time, and anyway, that’s how I became a man” story.

Like, really, the only charm the movie has is Meryl Streep, who is very good at accents and foreign languages and is a charismatic and compelling Manic Pixie Dream Holocaust Survivor Girl. But maybe she should save the good performance for a good movie. This is just tawdry trash that puts the “melodrama” into “melodrama.” It’s mind-blowing that people ever considered something like this to be good. Like, it’s from 1982 and this list was put together in 2007. This isn’t like some formative 1930s movie that doesn’t hold up well, this is recent shit. What the fuck.