…I strongly recommend you go see the movie “Run Boy Run.”

It is showing on Saturday, April 25 at 8:15 PM in Springfield, Massachusetts, at (of all places) the auditorium of the Basketball Hall of Fame. In fact, if you’re within driving distance, I urge you to make a special trip. It’s that good.

The movie was made in 2013, but it’s not available yet in DVD and I wonder whether it ever will be. If not, that’s shocking, because it’s an extraordinary film in every way. Story and script, but in particular the extremely fine acting from the international cast, the members of which each speak in their native tongues (mostly Polish, but quite a bit of German as well as Yiddish), as well as the cinematography. Never did Poland and northern Germany (which sometimes stands in for Poland) look so beautiful, in aching contrast to the searing story.

It’s full of brutality but balanced by heroism and the compassion of strangers who literally risk their own lives to help a small boy. I’ve never seen a film dealing with the Holocaust and World War II that deals so well with the different ways people reacted, from cruelty and eager cooperation to ambivalence and/or indifference to tentative sympathy and small acts of kindness to self-sacrificing courage of sort I would describe as nearly saintly. The film engenders so many emotions and provokes so much thought that it is one that will stay with you forever.

I would offer a trailer here (there are several on YouTube) but I hesitate because I think the trailers give away too many plotlines that should remain a surprise. So I’ll leave that to you.

But please, if you have a chance to see the movie, go.

[NOTE: If you’re a basketball fan, the Hall of Fame is right there, too. If you’re an Emily Dickinson fan, the house in the lovely New England town of Amherst where she lived and wrote her poems is a fascinating place to visit, and probably a bit different from the way you had pictured it.]