Irwin Shaw‘s short story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” is able to make one yearn for Sundays in New York City of old, postwar.

Michael and Frances are taking a pleasant walk on the city streets, but a problem is rising in their marriage. Michael compulsively looks at other women everywhere he goes, and he looks, Frances says, as though he wants them. Frances is persistently honest about her husband—no surprise there; then Michael becomes honest about himself. Not, however, without certain indications about Michael’s abiding love for his pretty-girl wife (in the last sentence, “such nice legs”). Will this husband redeem himself?

I read this enjoyable story on classicshorts.com

“The Elephant Whisperers” (2022), on Netflix, won an Oscar for best documentary short (sometimes the best kind of documentary), and indeed it is a beautiful little film about the caretaking of two orphaned elephants in South India. Director Kartiki Gonsalves observes precisely the goings-on of animals and humans in an appealing, not unpleasant rural area. Elephants enrich the landscape; nothing upstages them. The orphans here have a nobility that somehow leaves us unsurprised that they manage to thrive after being released into the wild.

Forty-five years, in Andrew Haigh‘s 45 Years (2015), is how long Geoff and Kate Mercer, of the U.K., have been married. Tom Courtenay plays Geoff, an aging retiree and liberal fool who begins to distress his wife. Courtenay overdoes Geoff’s doddering and uncertainty, while Charlotte Rampling is true and likable as Kate.

This is a small but meaningful film which presents marriage as a sad cheat. An hour and thirty minutes long, it ends before running out of steam. I said Rampling is likable—so is the film, even if the elderly couple’s lovemaking in bed is rather hard to watch.