You may not buy into actors playing Nazis with hightoned Brit accents, but the power of this Holocaust tale sneaks up and floors you. Writer-director Mark Herman has adapted John Boyne's novel with admirable restraint. Eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) isn't pleased when he and older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) are forced to leave their friends in Berlin and settle in a remote area where Bruno's commandant father (David Thewlis) has been stationed. The kids and their mother (Vera Farmiga) believe the fence they see outside their window encloses a farm, not a concentration camp. Bruno even ventures out of bounds and meets Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), the boy in striped pajamas behind the fence. They develop a dangerous, covert friendship with devastating results. Delicate allegorical business is being transacted here – a realization of evil seen from a child's point of view. The premise doesn't excuse lapses in logic (the boys would have been spotted instantly), but the power of the story and the performances – young Butterfi eld amazes – is indisputable.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."