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,…
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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…
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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,…