Terence Davies was born in 1945 to working-class Catholic parents in Liverpool, England. After a stint as a shipping clerk, Davies attended drama school, where he created the screenplays for what would become a trilogy of autobiographical films dealing with issues of religion, sexuality, and labor in England: Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), and [...]

In Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal (Dev Patel) is a young man from the slums of Mumbai who is chosen at random to enter a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-style contest on television. His tempestuous life experiences in the slum help him so completely with correctly solving the answers that his legitimacy is called [...]

In “Let the Right One In”, Oskar is a lonely twelve year-old who spends most of his time narrowly escaping the torment of his fellow classmates. Come to his rescue is a twelve year old girl, the pale and quiet Eli. They both live next door to each other in a non-descript apartment complex in [...]

Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky is a curious, Mercurial affair that casually embraces relevance. Leigh depicts the genuine enjoyment of life by a schoolteacher named Poppy who, for no clear reason, is able to successfully meet life’s simple challenges with a smile.
Unlike the drastic and wrong-headed turn by Benigni in Life is Beautiful, where [...]

In Laurent Cantent’s The Class (French title: Entr les murs/Between the Walls), a public school teacher in Paris grapples with frontiers that define and complicate his student body. The working class students, mostly of African, arab, and Chinese descent - question, doubt, and reinforce their French identity (”which soccer team do you root for in [...]

In Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor (2008), a Connecticut-based university professor (Richard Jenkins) returns to his New York City apartment only to find two immigrants sleeping there, victims of a real estate scam. The lonely Jenkins, still grieving over the death of his wife, allows the couple to remain, eventually befriending Tarek (Haaz Sleiman). When [...]