Sicily!

Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's 1999 film is adapted from Elio Vittorini's antifascist novel. A man who has lived a long time in New York returns to Sicily and talks with people along the way: two passengers on a train, a worker picking oranges, his mother and a knife grinder. The conversations look ordinary, while hunger, taxes, migration and power run through them. Every line in the film is taken from the novel, and the actors deliver the text not as everyday speech but as something plainly recited; that distance is Straub and Huillet's known method. The camera holds still, the cutting is sparse and the black and white image is in a narrow frame. It runs a little over an hour. Who it's for: viewers who like formalist cinema and literary adaptation. Who it's not for: anyone expecting naturalistic acting and narrative; the film refuses both.