"Free Men"

We are booked in for War Horse on Thursday, and tonight it was a Film Society offering also set in wartime, but World War II. The story centred upon an Algerian amongst Jews sheltered by a Mosque in occupied Paris.

I don't normally go for this sort of film, but Free Men was different. As the Sight and Sound critic wrote after its 2011 release, "It succeeds as something more contemplative, raising questions about the relationship between race, nation, creed, religion and even sexuality without ever sliding into didacticism."

As with the latest Coen Brothers' film, the last one we saw, some of the images were hauntingly beautiful - for instance, the face of the beggar forever sitting at the entrance to the Mosque. The man in this photograph (seen yesterday in Cheltenham's sunny Promenade) struck a similarly contemplative pose.