The Train of Childhood and Expectation

Maybe my uncritical opinion of this gem is much due to nostalgia and how much this moved me in my childhood, but even if that’s true, so what? Each character is excellently written and acted. Despite the misery of the period in history in which this series is set and the spoiled childhood that this depicts, this has an incredibly optimistic feel to it. It is endearing and tragicomic in a typically Czech way. Perhaps the only (and in fact irrelevant) downside is that the first episode is not quite as good as the rest of them. Or maybe that is a wrong way of putting it: it simply takes needlessly long to get up to speed. (03/20/2005)