Summer with Monika begins with the bustle of the city of Stockholm, where the inlets of the Baltic Sea split up its landmasses into a vast and thriving archipelago. The establishing shots and the exterior cutaways in this film are superb, lending to the atmosphere the lucid and palpable vibrancy of a city already on its way toward international stature, and they inform every aspect of the story itself and its characters. Stockholm has rarely felt more alive than in this film by Ingmar Bergman. It is the story of two lovers living in the city and working dead-end jobs, both of them as low-level stockroom clerks harried by their…
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In a working-class South Yorkshire community whose bread-and-butter economy is coal mining, a boy named Billy goes about his life as a hopeless student, brother, and son, runty and undernourished, neglected and bullied, condemned to a future in the pits like his resentful and abusive brother. As if it were a historical documentary dug up to reveal the cold and lifeless social repercussions of a stale working class, the film, its bleakness and the stark social realism of this Yorkshire milieu, homes in on the childhood of a lone boy as the beginning of it all—this is where the soul-deadening habits start, and on this segment of the populace the…
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Setting the cinematic standard for an adaptation of a play by William Shakespeare, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet received accolades aplenty when it was released in the fall of 1968. It seemed to have the hallmarks of a faithful literary adaptation from the beloved Bard, and its setting in modern Italy, using location shooting as a further stamp of authenticity, was to become the backdrop of the many sumptuous and sensuous scenes that brought Shakespeare to new and vivid life. This was a film of which Shakespeare himself might have been proud, resplendent with a young, vigorous cast, and for many of them it was the beginning of a glorious…
