The Elementary School

Do we really need another schoolboys-coming-of-age film like The Elementary School? Well, yes, if it's this one from Czech director Jan Sverak, whose Kolya won last spring's Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Set near Prague in 1945 — after Nazi occupation but before Soviet rule — the film puts a bittersweet spin on some standard childhood epiphanies: Growing up in a landscape of burnt-out tanks and abandoned live artillery, these battle-hardened kids don't have to catch their teacher with the tram driver's wife in order to lose their innocence. Newly released on video, Sverak's first feature paints an elegiac portrait of young people testing their wings in a fleeting moment of freedom. B+