Shoeshine (1946)
n/b, Criterion Collection

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An international breakthrough for neorealism, Vittorio De Sica's Academy Award-winning film is an indelible fable of innocence lost amid the hardscrabble reality of 1940s Italy. On the streets of Rome, two boys best friends Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) set out to raise the money to buy a horse by shining shoes. When they are inadvertently caught up in a robbery and sent to a brutal juvenile detention center, their loyalty to each other is severely tested. A devastating portrait of economic struggle made all the more haunting by its child's-eye perspective, Shoeshine stands as one of the defining achievements of postwar Italian filmmaking.