In the hands of the renowned experimental theater director Peter Brook, William Golding's legendary novel on the primitivism lurking beneath civilization becomes a film as raw and ragged as the lost boys at its center. Taking an innovative documentary-like approach, Brook shot Lord of The Flies with an off-the-cuff naturalism, seeming to record a spontaneous eruption of its characters' IDs. The result is a rattling masterpiece, as provocative as its...

Young Törless is to go to boarding school. His experiences there, the merciless torments of the pupils among themselves and the unsatisfactory answers of his teachers make it clear to Törless that good and bad cannot be differentiated in life. The boy leaves the boarding school at his own request after a short while. The incipient social and personal deformation in Musil's novel is skillfully implemented by Schlöndorff in close correspondence with...

"Few directors have portrayed the agonies and epiphanies of growing up as poetically---and controversially---as Louis Malle. Laced with autobiographical details, Murmur of the heart, Lacombe, Lucien, and Au revoir les enfants tell stories of youth, set against the tumult of World War II and postwar France. Tragic, amusing, and poignant, these three films are more than just coming-of-age stories. They are the director's ongong response to a world gone...