Robin Williams delivers the finest performance I have been privileged to see him give. Jakob is a role he carries off with impressive realism, and which significantly deepened my respect for the man's acting talent.<br /><br />As a Jew in a Polish ghetto under the Nazis, Robin Williams portrays a man hurting from the loss of wife, freedom and friends. Suicides abound, and children have long since been killed or shipped away from the ghetto. The entire backdrop is bleak, broken only by the cynical humor the Jews have developed as the merest survival technique. The excellent film-making further supports the atmosphere by almost making you feel you've stepped into a black-and-white era, walking the streets with Williams, watching death and depression eat away at the whole neighborhood.<br /><br />Things begin to change when Jakob, summoned by the commandant, overhears a radio bulletin. Encouraged by the report that the Russians are mere hundreds of miles away - a very little distance in the great give and take of war - the Jews begin to take heart, and the suicide rate is reduced to nil. Things are complicated for Jakob when his friends start to believe that the bulletin came from a radio that Jakob owns - a radio which doesn't exist - and begin to hound him, some for more information, and some because they want him to destroy it before it destroys them.<br /><br />The impressive cinematography and the convincing acting from the entire cast make this movie a must-see. 8 out of 10, with the two taken off for an ending that didn't sit well with me, but than again, can you really expect a movie with the Holocaust as its subject matter to be easily stomached?