The heart is certainly in the right place here, so I wish I had liked this film more than I did. It speaks to taking an unconventional path in life, one without the traditional conveniences but perhaps with more authenticity and connection to nature. There is a heartwarming sense of community and of helping one another even though these people are nomads, shifting across the country from one seasonal job to another and living out of their vans. By contrast,…

Anne Bancroft’s character is like a mirror here, reflecting the maddening truths about the times. She loves kids, saying “they don’t do you any harm,” and even though we see a large number of them tearing through the house now and then, they don’t cause the stress in her life. The main source of that is her husband (Peter Finch), a scriptwriter who starts off accepting her kids from previous marriages, but gradually resents not having his wife’s attention, and…

It has the makings of a film I’d usually like – intellectuals pondering man’s fate and the existential threat of nuclear war, the poetic visions of Andrei Tarkovsky, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist – and as it was Tarkovsky’s last film, I feel bad I didn’t like it more.

The setup is strong, with that long conversation with the postman and then the pessimism in the monolog of the main character (Erland Josephson) while his son crawls around: “We have acquired…

Two stories, presented as a film within a film, complement each other beautifully. In the outer one, a housekeeper (Rosa Valetti) is slowly poisoning her employer (Hermann Picha) after convincing him to disinherit his grandson. In the inner, a pared down telling of Molière’s play, a religious zealot (Emil Jannings) is duping a rich man (Werner Krauss) out of his money, to the horror of his wife (Lil Dagover). She hatches a plan to expose him by tempting him with…