The pleasures of "The Learning Tree," an awkward but greatly affecting movie, are all bound up with nostalgia for a vanished land in which barefooted farm boys could do cartwheels through unbounded fields of yellow flowers, in which a preacher could implore the Lord to "deliver our young from cigarettes, from dancing, from drinking, from flapper skirts," in which an amorous young man could give his girl a bottle of violet water and a card, especially made up to go with it, that said: "Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you."…

Parks has made, among several other things, a predictably pictorial period piece in soft-spoken Technicolor. He has made a lovely small movie about boyhood; not black boyhood or white boyhood so much as human boyhood, the maybehood that follows babyhood. He has also made a movie about the perilous plight of...