The 77-year-old Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell had his Hollywood moment in the 1970s, when his 1971 family saga The Emigrants was nominated for four Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture, a rare feat for a foreign-language movie. Its follow-up, The New Land, had to settle for a nomination for Best Foreign Film. Troell would end up burning off his good name in Hollywood by making two American films, the misconceived Zandy's Bride and the full-scale train wreck Hurricane; his movies haven't been especially well distributed in this country since, and neither The Emigrants nor The New Land nor his balloon-expedition film The Flight of the Eagle (which was nominated for Best Foreign Film in 1983) are available here on DVD. Troell's new picture Everlasting Moments probably won't do much to raise his profile in this country. It's stuck with a title that sounds like a Hallmark card, and that and the fact that it's another period family drama, set in the Swedish countryside in the early years of the twentieth century, will probably help to stigmatize it as something worthy and stone boring. (I've already heard one publicity flack--for a different movie, of course-- helpfully warn a critic on his way to a press screening that he should prepare to be bored stupid.) It's actually a terrific movie, a two hour-ten minute epic that takes its time but never feels dull.

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