Director Michael Winner (The Nightcomers, Death Wish) casts a jaded eye on the beach movie and comes up with a surprisingly frank look at beachside beatniks in this drama of a seaside Don Juan who realizes he's becoming too old to keep up his love-'em-and-leave-'em lifestyle. Oliver Reed stars as Tinker, a seaside photographer who has turned his business of snapping holiday portraits of tourists into a system for spotting comely young birds. With their names and addresses in hand, he puts them into a pool and he and his friends go on the make. But Tinker, a cheeky character with an unhealthy disdain for the middle class crowds, finds himself on the other end of the holiday romance when he falls for a sophisticated model, Nicola (Jane Merrow), a smart, confident woman who proves every inch his match. "Are you hoping I'd go to bed with you?" she asks on a visit to his hovel of a studio. In this film shot by future director Nicolas Roeg and edited in a style that at times recalls the giddy energy of A Hard Day's Night, Winner transforms the fun-in-the-sun antics of his romantic mercenaries into an introspective character study set in the dying days of summer. Reed creates a melancholy figure in his underachieving, flip-talking cad who keeps his façade intact to the end in an empty gesture of blasé indifference. Music is provided by the Searchers, who make a rare film appearance in a club scene. -Sean Axmaker.

An extraordinary and deeply moving film that retains much of its power since its original release in 1959, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the story of a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) who become lovers in the city of Hiroshima, where the U. S. dropped a nuclear bomb to end World War II in the Pacific. Written by Marguerite Duras and juggled, as if by wandering thoughts, in chronology and setting by Resnais, the film reveals the miserable and mortifying experiences of each character during the war and suggests the obvious healing properties of their relationship in the present. An emotional allusion or two can certainly be made with the more recent The English Patient, but nothing can quite prepare one for Resnais's extreme yet intuitively accessible experiments in fusing the past, present, and future into great sweeps of subjectively experienced memory. Yet audiences have never had trouble relating to this bold milestone of the French New Wave, largely because at its heart is a genuinely affecting, soulful love story. -Tom Keogh.