We all heard of the Holocaust. We all know about the evil Nazis and the atrocities that happened during that horrible time, but none of us were there. It's hard to imagine what it was like and what those people went through.

This is the story of a modern girl in a Jewish family. She is not interested in hearing the stories of her relatives who survived the concentration camps because the idea is so foreign to her it's almost laughable.She reluctantly attends a passover seder with her parents where her aunts and uncles talk about "the camps" and she just dismisses the conversation. When she goes to put out the ceremonial cup of wine for Elijah, the profit she is transported in time to a village in Poland (I think it was poland). Everyone recognizes her as Hannah (her ancestor she was named after). She wakes up in a surreal "wizard of Oz like" setting where she is awaken after an apparent illness. Her "cousin" Rifka (played so sweetly by Brittany Murphy)tries to help her jar her "memory" of being her "cousin from Lublin" who is visiting". They walk through their quaint village as everyone is preparing for a wedding. Hannah is confused, but seems to just go with her new reality without too much question.

After the wedding is over several cars pull up to the village with Nazis with guns and trucks to transport the Jews to the camps. The people are scared and confused, but Hannah is the most terrified as she has the terrible forsight of what is about to happen.

She tries to figure out what is going on, whether she is dreaming, hallucinating, or what, but eventually realizes she is now a Jew in a concentration camp during world war 2 like it or not and she has to let fate play out.

This movie is powerful. To see the holocaust from the perspective of someone who already knows what has happened is chilling. From the time they arrive at the camp and are stripped of their clothes, dignity, money, possessions, have their hair shaved, are forced into slave labor and eventually murdered. Obviously the girl (hannah's) life would be changed forever if she ever woke up from the nightmare.

Great film.

This film is *very* basic stuff; the dream/time-travel theme, the typical war-drama clichés, etc. The whole film is just so bland and and the way it handles the serious subject... I don't know, it's just like a... Schindler's List Light; you get the important subject and a few well-known actors, but without any shred of anything else worth watching a movie for. The plot is lame, just a rehash of the dream/time-travel formula, in which the main character travels through time because he/she must learn an important lesson(like, say, Christmas is important, caring is important, and in this one, the Holocaust was and is important; bear in mind, I'm not saying it's untrue... I'm merely saying that it's an overly tongue in cheek way of telling us that),and wanders about, constantly talking about things that don't exist in that time period, instead of wising up and keeping her mouth shut; how many of these movies have been made, anyway? They should have stopped making them back in whatever decade they started. It's too bad the important subject has to be dumbed down to a childish "adventure" just to make teens and kids aware of what went on during the Holocaust(which the film arguably does a somewhat half-bad job of, since it's made into a PG-movie). Come on, I'd have rather sat through an informational but dull retelling of the story, instead of sitting through this tripe. The plot is tame and cliché-ridden, badly paced and not very interesting. Once again, too bad for a film with such an important a subject. The acting is decent at best; not surprising for a TV-movie cast, but come on... Brittany Murphy and Kirsten Dunst can do better than this. They may not be the best teen actresses out there, but they're better than this. The characters are mostly clichés and stereotypes. The cinematography is unimaginative. One of the biggest problems apart from everything I've written up to this point was that it focused very much on the Jewish religion and their customs, which seem strange and ridiculous, at least to me. That made them all the more unappealing to me, along with their one-dimensional personalities and poorly written and even more poorly delivered dialog. But, maybe I'm just too anti-religious and atheistic. Meh. My point is; you don't really care about these people, since their personalities are paper-thin and you know from the very moment they are introduced exactly what is going to happen to them, at least if you have any experience with the genre. Basically, the movie has a good point, but it's poorly presented and too much of the film is just poorly executed and ends up making you smirk or even laugh at what you're supposed to start crying at. I recommend this movie only to kids and other easily impressible people. I suppose if you *must* see every movie about the Holocaust, this isn't the worst either. You could do a lot worse, but you certainly could do a hell of a lot better, too. 5/10

The Jewish Hannah Stern (Kirsten Dunst) does not pay much attention to Jewish traditions. In a celebration in the house of her aunt Eva (Louise Fletcher),Hannah drinks too much wine and passes out. When she wakes up, she traveled in time and arrives in the house of a Jewish family in Polland in the Eve of the German invasion. She becomes friend of Rivkah (Brittany Murphy) and they are sent to a concentration camp, where Hannah lives the horror of the Holocaust. Having the names of Kirsten Dunst and Brittany Murphy in the credits, I really expected that "The Devil's Arithmetic" was a good movie. However, the theme of the Holocaust is so explored in Hollywood, that the unique originality in this film is the mix with time travel without any explanation. In the end, it is corny and shallow as a drama of war, and it is not a good fantasy film. It seems that the main intention of "The Devil's Arithmetic" is to remember always the atrocities of the Holocaust, as said by aunt Eva to Hannah. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Matemática do Diabo" ("Devil's Mathematic")