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The tagline to 1997's The Winter Guest invites us to "Come in from the cold," and viewers who accept this faint beckoning soon look on as the cast of this unique Scottish  production does just that in one singularly metaphorical fashion or another. This is a quiet movie that says little with the spoken word and yet still tells one of the most poignantly rich stories ever committed to film. The Winter Guest takes place all in one frozen winter day in a town in rural Scotland, and brings four intertwined vignettes together as it imparts its barely whispered and unforgettable tales. There is a grieving young widow's resistance to her mother's attempts to bring her out of her deep depression; there are two boys who skip school and retreat to the frozen seashore to hide out for the day in this the last winter of their already fleeting childhood; there are two elderly ladies who bravely stare back at death by traveling to funerals of people barely known to them; and there is an eccentric girl, Nita, who forces a boy she fancies---Alex, the son of the widow, Frances, played by Emma Thompson---to finally take notice of her via a playfully serious confrontation amid the ice-covered streets of the little town they share. The Winter Guest would simply never have been made in America, nor could it have been. It is a story that requires patience, sensitivity and insight into the human condition, and for the investment of all of these, returns the sort of intelligently psychological motion picture that is all but extinct in this decade.

Painfully true.  If a movie doesn't have sex, explosions, gun play, or chicks bonding, it won't come out of Hollywood.