In one of several, equally heart-rending and inspiring segments in Videoletters entitled Vlada and Ivica, Vlada and his father Zoran, a Serbian, finishes recording his videotaped message and begins to reflect pensively on their family’s inevitable estrangement from the intended videoletter recipient, Vlada’s childhood friend Ivica and his father Zeljko Krilcici, a colleague and long-time […]
From a seemingly innocuous encounter between a gregarious musician who goes by the stage name Piranha and an impassive and unambitious cab driver, Alejandro, whom he recognizes (perhaps mistakenly) as his brother’s childhood friend, Martín Rejtman creates an effervescent comedy of errors as the well-intentioned Piranha and his equally enthusiastic wife attempt to reunite Alejandro […]
Harriet (Patricia Walters) is a pensive, awkward, and fanciful adolescent growing up in Bengal near the banks of the river. The eldest child of a jute factory manager (Esmond Knight), she spends most of her days writing poetry in her diary and observing life pass by over the garden walls with her attractive and self-confident […]
The opening scenes of La Grande Illusion provide a subtle reflection of the old European social order during the First World War, as Captain de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay) studies aerial surveillance maps from the safe distance of his office in order to plot out military strategy. There is an aberration in the photographs, and de […]
A lone automobile arrives at an unassuming rural inn appropriately called the Frontier Café and Hotel on a bucolic northern border town, as a cheerful and genteel businessman named Meunier (Henri Guisol) provides a cursory orientation of the couple’s proximity to the border before bidding a sincere, fond farewell to his two visibly exhausted, but […]
A meek and unassuming office clerk, Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon), declines an invitation from his goading co-workers to turn the evening’s dinner banquet festivities into a night of carousing, citing his need to be home before his wife’s preset midnight curfew. On the way home, he encounters a physical altercation between a wanton young woman […]