Cinema: Together

A battered mom and her wary, angry kids take refuge in a Stockholm commune, mismanaged by her sweetly passive brother. The time is the early '70s, and some of the hippies are, perhaps, secretly yearning for red meat, TV and conventional structures. Still, they have some useful things to teach their visitors about free-form domesticity. And some equally useful things to learn about traditional virtue. We, meanwhile, are free to adore a sad, funny, always good-natured film that eccentrically, tolerantly explores that moment when revolutionary ardor commingled with bourgeois stolidity to form our present weirdly ambiguous culture.

--By Richard Schickel