I am always whining about a movie’s simple plot line.  Oh, they try to fool us with funny sub-plots or blockbuster special effects, but I know a predictable main plot when I see one.  The main story line in Central Station is not a mind bender, i.e. a poor boy named Josuè becomes an orphan when his mother is killed by a truck in front of him, and he latches on to the only other adult he knows.  That adult happens to be an older, independent woman, named Dora, who writes letters for people in the train station for a living.  Unfortunately, Dora never really posts the letters her patrons so desperately send, and Josuè and his mother were regular customers for letters to boy’s long lost father.  Josuè’s intrusion upon Dora’s sour life challenges her, and the movie is anything but predictable.  It is the characters in this movie, and all movies for that matter, that make the movie complex, interesting, and utterly absorbing.  Now if this is your concept of entertainment, you will like this movie.  However, if you define entertainment using the words, “mind numbing,” you will probably be even more disappointed to hear that Central Station is subtitled.  Yes, it is a foreign film, and it deals with heavy subjects like poverty, death, and loneliness.  Apparently the boy who plays Josuè ran up to the director in the Rio De Janeiro airport to shine his shoes and was ‘discovered’ for the part, or ‘typecast’ so to speak.  Poverty itself is a pretty complex subject, especially when the grit, and exhaustion and desperation of poverty are transmitted to the audience by the facial movement of a young boy. Powerful stuff.  I give Central Station five stars!