)and cannot really be comprised in such a structure.We receive something more naked, something that pours out of the screen [...] "Shoeshine" has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in film works that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium — if Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty [...] This tragic study of the corruption of innocence is intense, compassionate, and above all, humane."