The Rifleman

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You can watch The Rifleman (2019) on Hoopla with a participating library card, rent on Apple TV+, or buy on Apple TV+.

The love story of sixteen-year-old Arturs is interrupted by the First World War. After losing his mother and his home, he finds some consolation in joining the army, because this is the first time national battalions are allowed in the Russian Empire. But war is nothing like Arturs imagined – no glory, no fairness. It is brutal and painful. Arturs is now completely alone as war takes the lives of his father and brother. Also, no progress is made in the promised quick resolution of the war and timely return home. Within the notion that only he alone cares about returning home and that his homeland is just a playground for other nations, Arturs finds strength for the final battle and eventually returns home to start everything from scratch, just like his newly born country.

A heavy sense of disillusionment clings to every frame as the romanticism of war evaporates into the mud of the trenches. This portrait of lost youth follows a teenager trading his innocence for the brutal, unglamorous reality of a soldier's life.

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