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The recent horrors in Afghanistan have once more exposed the callousness with which too many residents of Europe and the U.S. speak of refugees, whereby displaced human lives become numbers, coldly counted and ranked on a long list of national priorities: not people to be saved, but problems to be solved. If there’s room for them at all, that’s all the reward one dare ask for. To bring up other human needs, of emotional or intellectual fulfilment beyond a roof to sleep under, is to be ungracious in the eyes of the media and the privileged public.

But man cannot survive on survival alone, a point that Serbian director Stefan Arsenijević’s modern refugee fable “As Far As I Can Walk” makes with hushed, heartbroken clarity. A portrait of a Ghanaian refugee couple settled — practically, if not spiritually — in a shabby but serviceable Serbian camp, it begins...

I haven’t done one of these posts in a while, since April in fact, and back then I talked about how I was resisting moving my movie poster curation over to Instagram from Tumblr. But just a couple of weeks later I bit the bullet and launched Movie Poster of the Day: Instagram edition. I still don’t love Instagram as a platform for posters as much as Tumblr—people tend to look at it on smaller screens for one thing, posters are not so easy to share and re-blog, and I much prefer the look of Tumblr’s archive page which keeps posters at their original ratio. But Instagram is the future, or at least the present, and so I’m now posting in both places, and though Tumblr tells me I have 314,457 followers, versus 1,094 on Instagram, the number of likes I get on each is surprisingly similar...

Above: French grande for Capricious Summer. Artist: F. Dervanore.As the 56th New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, I wanted to look back half a century to the 6th edition of the festival. Uppermost in everyone’s minds in September 1968 was Czechoslovakia, which, after a brief seven months of liberation known as the Prague Spring, had been invaded less than a month before the festival began, by Warsaw Pact tanks and troops intended to suppress reforms. Whether it had been planned before the Soviet invasion, the 6th New York Film Festival notably opened and closed with Czech films: Jiri Menzel’s Capricious Summer and Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball. It also featured Jan Nemec’s previously banned 1966 film A Report on the Party and the Guests which had been released in ’68 under the reformist president Alexander Dubček and shown as a special event on Czech national...