"Cinema Paradiso" (1990)

Director Giuseppe Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso," this year's Oscar-winner for Best Foreign-Language Film, is an enchanting, sweeping look at post-WWII life, real and reel. It's set mostly in a small Italian village, but the characters, situations and changes it depicts are universal. You don't have to be Italian to empathize with a young man whose dreams are too big for his hometown to possibly fulfill, or to appreciate the village priest who previews every picture, indicating censorable scenes by ringing a bell. And you don't have to read subtitles to recognize an Italian-speaking John Wayne in "Stagecoach" or to pick up on the frustration of a 50-ish man who takes an exam alongside 10-year-olds in the hopes of earning a belated grade-school diploma. In this case, nothing is lost in the translation.

The film's center is Salvatore DiVita (Phillipe Noiret), whose twenty-odd years in the village of Giancaldo are built around his obsession with the local theatre, the ramshackle Cinema Paradiso whose shabby walls and wooden seats seem to disappear when they're washed in the silver-grey glow of Hollywood and Rome. Building a friendship with Alfredo (Jacques Perrin), the projectionist, Salvatore becomes increasingly absorbed in the magic of the cinema, which reflects the changes in the outside world. Things change in film as well. Censorship ends with the arrival of Bridget Bardot, and fire-proof safety film replaces the unstable silver nitrate that could turn a theatre into an inferno. Notes Alfredo, who was blinded in a booth fire, "Progress always comes too late."

It's Alfredo who pushes Salvatore out of Giancaldo, realizing that the town is a comfortable dead-end. Thirty years later, when Salvatore returns from Rome for the first time, his mother sees that his mentor was right: "Here, there are only ghosts." Tornatore conveys the message most movingly as he shows us what Salvatore's fate would have been had he stayed behind: Everyone in Giancaldo is older, but still doing the same jobs they did three decades before. All the changes in town are cosmetic. His vision is bittersweet, but not depressing, and the pathos never feel manipulative. Cheap sentiment is easy to come by in movies; films this emotionally honest are rare indeed.