Alois Nebel

Based on an acclaimed Czech graphic novel, filmmaker Tom­āš Luňák's animated drama uses black-and-white digital overlays to create striking, noir-like visuals. The title character (voiced by Miroslav Krobot) is an aging, taciturn, railway-station dispatcher in Czechoslovakia in 1989, a time when the Cold War is entering its terminal phase and the Warsaw Pact nations are beginning to collapse. After seeing a vagrant man roughed up and arrested at the station, Nebel begins experiencing flashbacks to grim memories of Nazi German and Soviet collaboration, and eventually checks himself into a psychiatric clinic—an act that costs him his job. A trip to plead with railway administrators in Prague leads Nebel to strike up a relationship with a trainman's widow running a boarding-house. Returning to the countryside, Nebel talks his way back into service with the father-and-son team running the station, who plan to turn the place into a black-market hub. Ultimately, the accumulation of what seem like random incidents will add up to a revenge-murder conspiracy in this moody, stylish, and offbeat foreign film. Recommended. (C. Cassady)