Meryl Streep is fantastic, always convincing as a Polish survivor of a concentration camp. Rest of the movie is at turns silly, grating, and maudlin. Seems inappropriate to make the real life outrages of the Holocaust fodder for a sappy southern boy's bildungsroman. "Stingo" is an annoying Thomas Wolfe stereotype of the sensitive genius writer; unfortunately we are subjected to examples of his overwrought purple prose in voiceovers that sound lifted from The Waltons. If we only could have been spared the confession that his climatic tryst with Sophie was the end of his virginity; I had bad flashbacks to "Summer of 42". Still gets four stars because Streep is just so good.