ForeignJacques Tati's gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology reached their creative apex with Playtime. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust the endearingly clumsy, resolutely old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a bafflingly modernist Paris. With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, Playtime is a lasting testament to a modern age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.
ForeignMars is under siege! Just before Halloween 2071, a terrorist bomb destroys a tanker truck on Highway One, close to a densely populated crater city. There are casualties up to half a mile from the blast. 500 killed or injured by what appears to be a biochemical weapon. The rewards for the bombers capture is massive and there are four humans and a dog who really need the money. Down on their luck as usual, the crew of the Bebop get on the case.
ForeignOnce-great Spanish matador Nacho Martinez has been reduced to starring in gruesome "snuff" films. Martinez is idolized by Antonio Banderas, who has no notion of his idol's current illegal profession. Terrified at the thought of drawing blood in the bullring, Banderas nevertheless seeks out Martinez' assistance in preparing for a bullfighting career. To prove his "machismo", Banderas rapes Martinez' lady-friend Eva Cobo. No one will believe Banderas' confession of the rape, so he decides to attach more importance to his crime by confessing to a recent rash of serial killings (actually perpetrated by Martinez and his cohorts). Bandera's case is taken by feminist attorney Assumpta Serna, who unwittingly--but not unwillingly--sets herself up as Martinez' next "conquest."
ForeignGraceful, enigmatic, and often frightening, DOGTOOTH is an ingenious dark comedy that won the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, propelling Yorgos Lanthimos to the forefront of contemporary cinema's most ambitious young filmmakers. In an effort to protect their three children from the corrupting influence of the outside world, a Greek couple transforms their home into a gated compound of cultural deprivation and strict rules of behavior. But children cannot remain innocent forever. When the father brings home a young woman to satisfy his son's sexual urges, the family's engineered "reality" begins to crumble, with devastating consequences. Like the haunting, dystopic visions of Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noé, DOGTOOTH punctuates its compelling drama with moments of shocking violence, creating a biting social satire that is as profound as it is provocative.
ForeignThis critically-acclaimed, Oscar®-winning film (Best Foreign Language Film, 2006) is the erotic, emotionally-charged experience Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly) calls "a nail-biter of a thriller!" Before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, East Germany's population was closely monitored by the State Secret Police (Stasi). Only a few citizens above suspicion, like renowned pro-Socialist playwright Georg Dreyman, were permitted to lead private lives. But when a corrupt government official falls for Georg's stunning actress-girlfriend, Christa, an ambitious Stasi policeman is ordered to bug the writer's apartment to gain incriminating evidence against the rival. Now, what the officer discovers is about to dramatically change their lives - as well as his - in this seductive political thriller Peter Travers (Rolling Stone) proclaims is "the best kind of movie: one you can't get out of your head."
ForeignAt 16, Justine is a brilliant, promising student and a strict vegetarian. But when she starts veterinary school, she quickly encounters a decadent, merciless and dangerously seductive world. Desperate to fit in during the first week of hazing rituals, she strays from her principles and eats raw meat for the first time and faces the terrible and unexpected consequences of her actions as her true self emerges.
ForeignFrom acclaimed Korean writer/director Kim Ki-Duk comes this exquisitely beautiful and award-winning human drama set on a tree-lined lake where a tiny Buddhist monastery floats on a raft. Under the vigilant eye of Old Monk (Yeong-su Oh), Child Monk learns a hard lesson about the nature of sorrow when some of his childish games turn cruel. In the intensity and lushness of summer, the monk, now a young man (Young-min Kim), experiences the power of lust, a desire that will ultimately lead him to dark deeds. With winter, the man atones for his past actions, and spring starts the cycle anew. With an extraordinary attention to visual detail, Kim has crafted an original yet universal story about the human spirit, moving from innocence, through love and evil, to enlightenment and finally rebirth.
ForeignThis multiple award winner from Tom Tykwer (The Princess And The Warrior) stars Franka Potente as Lola, the orange-haired punk girlfriend of Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a small-time courier for a big-time gangster. Manni is working a standard pickup/drop-off, and everything is going fine until an unforeseen incident makes Lola late to pick him up. One stroke of bad luck leads to another, and by the time Manni calls Lola, he has a big problem: He is supposed to meet his unforgiving boss in 20 minutes with 100,000 marks that suddenly he does not have. Lola rushes out of her apartment, attempting to get to Manni and somehow pick up 100,000 marks along the way. As the seconds tick down, the tiniest choices become life-altering (or -ending) decisions, and the fine line between fate and fortune begins to blur.
ForeignThe preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with his marvelous CAUGHT BY THE TIDES. Assembled from footage shot over a span of 23 years—a beguiling mix of fiction and documentary, featuring a cascade of images taken from previous movies, unused scenes, and newly shot dramatic sequences—CAUGHT BY THE TIDES is a free-flowing work of unspoken longing, carried along more by music than dialogue as it looms around the edges of a poignant love story. The film mostly adheres to the perspective of Qiaoqiao (Jia’s immortal muse Zhao Tao) as she wanders an increasingly unrecognizable country in search of long-lost lover Bin (Li Zhubin), who left their home city of Datong seeking new financial prospects. The always captivating Zhao carries the film with her delicate expressiveness, while Jia constantly evokes cinema’s ability to capture the passage of time and the persistence of chang
ForeignThe coming-of-age story of a precocious and outspoken young Iranian girl that begins during the Islamic Revolution. We meet nine-year-old Marjane when the fundamentalists first take power, forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands. The story then follows her as she cleverly outsmarts the "social guardians" and discovers punk, ABBA and Iron Maiden, while living with the terror of government persecution and the Iran/Iraq war. Then Marjane's journey moves on to Austria where, as a teenager, her parents send her to school in fear for her safety and she has to combat being equated with the religious fundamentalism and extremism she fled her country to escape. Marjane eventually gains acceptance in Europe, but finds herself alone and horribly homesick, and returns to Iran to be with her family, though it means putting on the veil and living in a tyrannical society. After a difficult period of adjustment, she enters art school and marries, continuing to speak out against the hypocri
ForeignThe lush and breathtaking beauty of the Alps, filmed with painterly grace under natural light from frigid winter to redemptive spring, provides the physical and emotional backdrop for VERMIGLIO, Maura Delpero’s visionary film, which won the Silver Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. This singular portrait of a sprawling family, set in the small, mountainous village of Vermiglio during the waning days of WWII, follows a series of dramatic, consequential events after the arrival of a taciturn Sicilian soldier (Giuseppe De Domenico), who hides out in town after deserting the army. While there, the soldier develops a romance with the family's eldest daughter, Lucia (Martina Scrinzi). VERMIGLIO shows the lives of a provincial family in a remote village suspended in time by the customs of a fading era. Conjuring stories from her own family’s past, Delpero creates a deeply personal and human tale that recalls the great neorealist movement in Italian cinema, but through Lucia’s perspe
ForeignAnne is a lawyer with a beautiful home, family and life. When her troubled step-son comes to live with them, she forms an intimate bond with him. Initially a liberating move, soon turns into a disturbing story with devastating consequences.
ForeignThe year is 2044: artificial intelligence controls all facets of a stoic society as humans routinely "erase" their feelings. Hoping to eliminate pain caused by their past-life romances, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) continually falls in love with different incarnations of Louis (George MacKay). Set first in Belle Époque-era Paris, Louis is a British man who woos her away from a cold husband, then in early 21st Century Los Angeles, he is a disturbed American bent on delivering violent "retribution." Will the process allow Gabrielle to fully connect with Louis in the present, or are the two doomed to repeat their previous fates? Visually audacious director Bertrand Bonello (SAINT LAURENT, NOCTURAMA) fashions his most accomplished film to date: a sci-fi epic, inspired by Henry James' turn- of-the-century novella, THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE, suffused with mounting dread and a haunting sense of mystery. Punctuated by a career-defining, three-role performance by Seydoux, THE BEAST poignantly conv
ForeignOn January 3, 1889 in Turin, Italy, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert. Not far from him, a cab driver is having trouble with a stubborn horse. The horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. After this, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan, until he loses consciousness and his mind. Somewhere in the countryside, the driver of the cab lives with his daughter and the horse. Outside, a windstorm rages. Immaculately photographed in Tarr’s renowned long takes, The Turin Horse is the final statement from a master filmmaker.
ForeignSensual and elegant, Catherine Corsini’s SUMMERTIME follows Carole and Delphine as they fall in love against the backdrop of early feminist activism in 1971 France. After living in the city, Delphine is called home to help with her family farm in the countryside and is forced to choose between her responsibility to them and the life of love she had in Paris with Carole. An enlightening tale about the infatuation of first love and its universal themes.
ForeignIn Mussolini’s Italy, repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode – and murder – joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an insane asylum in a stadium’ and wife Stefania Sandrelli and lover Dominique Sanda dancing the tango in a working class hall. But those are only a few of this political thriller’s anthology pieces, others including Trintignant’s honeymoon coupling with Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their window; a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary, glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office; a murder victim’s hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a wintry forest. Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece, adapted from the Alberto Moravia novel, boasts an authentic Art Deco look created by production des
ForeignWith MASCULIN FÉMININ, ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola," through a gang of restless youths engaged in hopeless love affairs with music, revolution, and one another. French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud stars as Paul, an idealistic would-be intellectual struggling to forge a relationship with the adorable pop star Madeleine (real-life yé-yé girl Chantal Goya). Through their tempestuous affair, Godard fashions a candid and wildly funny free-form examination of youth culture in pulsating 1960s Paris, mixing satire and tragedy as only Godard can.
ForeignBoth a landmark of radical political cinema and one of the most visually ravishing films ever made, this legendary hymn to revolution shimmers across the screen like a fever dream of rebellion. The result of an extraordinarily ambitious collaboration between the Soviet and Cuban film industries, director Mikhail Kalatozov’s I AM CUBA unfolds in four explosive vignettes that capture Cuban life on the brink of transformation, as crushing economic exploitation and inequality give way to a working-class uprising. Backed by Carlos Fariñas’s stirring score, the dazzling camera work by Sergei Urusevsky—an inspiration for generations of filmmakers to follow—gives flight to the movie’s message of liberation.
ForeignWinner of the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is the new film from the celebrated director of Distant and Climates. In the dead of night, a group of men – among them, a police commissioner, a prosecutor, a doctor and a murder suspect – drive through the Anatolian countryside, the serpentine roads and rolling hills lit only by the headlights of their cars. They are searching for a corpse, the victim of a brutal murder. The suspect, who claims he was drunk, can’t remember where he buried the body. As night wears on, details about the murder emerge and the investigators’ own hidden secrets come to light. In the Anatolian steppes, nothing is what it seems; and when the body is found, the real questions begin.
ForeignBased on a novel by the legendary Marcel Pagnol, JEAN DE FLORETTE is (alongside MANON OF THE SPRING) the first installment in a rich, engrossing epic of greed and deception set amid the bucolic splendor of the Provence countryside. Gerard Depardieu gives one of his great performances as the hunchbacked city slicker Jean, who is determined to make a success of the farm he has inherited—unaware that his new neighbor César (Yves Montand) and his nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) have launched a ruthless scheme to take control of the land for themselves.
ForeignIn this beautiful and uplifting gay romance, two teen track stars discover first love as they train for the biggest relay race of their young lives. Dutch phenom Gijs Blom stars as Sieger, a thoughtful 15-year-old who grapples mightily with his emerging sexuality. Ko Zandvliet co-stars as his love interest, the spirited, outgoing, and popular Marc.In their boyish summer courtship the pair swim, bike, and run — they also share ice creams and kisses as they gradually find the courage to be vulnerable with one another. The romance between them unfolds with a palpable sense of longing, and an aching sequence of heartache as Sieger tries to fight the inevitable outcome. With its authentic and perfectly poignant tone, plus an irresistible pop soundtrack, Mischa Kamp’s Boys ranks as one of the most wholesomely romantic gay teen films ever.
ForeignWhite Vertigo (Vertigine bianca) is one of the unexpected jewels of this Olympic films collection. Assiduously restored, it basks in the chromatic palette of Eastmancolor, with yellows, reds, and blues predominating. The cinematography is by none other than Aldo Scavarda, who would film L’avventura for Michelangelo Antonioni three and a half years later. The music is by the prolific Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, who early in his career had scored Othello for Orson Welles (and would return to the maestro’s side for Chimes at Midnight). His audacious use of jazz piano to accompany the ice hockey matches brings a lyrical mood to a sport that in other Olympic Games documentaries is portrayed in ferocious terms.
ForeignThe Prince is an explosive homoerotic prison drama set in a repressive 1970s Chilean prison. During a night of heavy drinking, Jaime, a hot-tempered narcissist, suddenly stabs his best friend. He is sent to jail for murder and there, alone and afraid, he comes under the protection of a tough older inmate known as “The Stallion.” The unlikely pair begin a clandestine romance but violent power struggles inside the penitentiary threaten their bond. This searing story of survival at all costs, takes its inspiration from Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’amour and Fassbinder’s Querelle in its affecting exploration of masculine aggression, conflicting loyalties and pent-up sexual desires.
ForeignPanah Panahi, son and collaborator of embattled filmmaker Jafar Panahi and apprentice to Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and deeply moving comic drama. 'Hit the Road' takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four – two middle-aged parents and their sons, one a taciturn adult, the other an ebullient six-year-old – as they drive across the Iranian countryside. Over the course of the trip, they bond over memories of the past, grapple with fears of the unknown, and fuss over their sick dog. Unspoken tensions arise and the film builds emotional momentum as it slowly reveals the furtive purpose for their journey. The result is a humanist drama that offers an authentic, often comedic, and deeply sincere observation of an Iranian family preparing to part with one of their own.
ForeignSmall-time swindler Marcos (Ricardo Darín) observes Juan (Gastón Pauls) pulling off a scam on a cashier, and then getting caught as he attempts the same trick again. Claiming to be a policeman, Marcos drags Juan out of the store, then reveals himself to be a fellow grifter with a higher stakes game in mind, and invites Juan to be his partner. When an old time con-man enlists them to sell a forged set of extremely valuable rare stamps,"The Nine Queens," the tricky negotiations that ensue introduce a cast of suspicious characters including Marcos' beautiful sister Valeria (Leticia Brédice) and their innocent younger brother Federico (Tomás Fonzi). As the deceptions and duplicity mount, a slew of thieves and con artists make it difficult to figure out who is conning whom.
ForeignHayley Mills plays a young school teacher who lives in a London suburb and is intent on staying virginal until her wedding day. Oliver Reed and Noel Harrison try to tempt her away from her virtuous path in this charming, romantic comedy.
ForeignFrom director Luc Besson (The Fifth Element) comes this thriller about a vicious street punk turned sexy, sophisticated and lethally dangerous assassin. Starring Anne Parillaud, Jeanne Moreau and Jean Reno. Rescued from death row by a top-secret agency, Nikita (Anne Parillaud) is slowly transformed from a cop-killing junkie into a cold-blooded bombshell with a license to kill. But when she begins the deadliest mission of her career only to fall for a man who knows nothing of her true identity Nikita discovers that in the dark and ruthless world of espionage, the greatest casualty of all...is true love.
ForeignWith this breakthrough film, Federico Fellini launched both himself and his wife and collaborator Giulietta Masina to international stardom, breaking with the neorealism of his early career in favor of a personal, poetic vision of life as a bittersweet carnival. The infinitely expressive Masina registers both childlike wonder and heartbreaking despair as Gelsomina, loyal companion to the traveling strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn, in a toweringly physical performance), whose callousness and brutality gradually wear down her gentle spirit. Winner of the very first Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, LA STRADA possesses the purity and timeless resonance of a fable and remains one of cinema’s most exquisitely moving visions of humanity struggling to survive in the face of life’s cruelties.
ForeignAvailable online for the first time, SEX AND LUCIA is a visually stunning and thematically adventurous look at passion, elusive relationships and deep bonds between people who thought they were strangers. Lucía is a young waitress in Madrid, who seeks refuge on a quiet, secluded Mediterranean island after the loss of her longtime boyfriend. Amidst the fresh air, dazzling sun, and glistening deep blue water, Lucía begins to piece together the dark corners of her past relationship. Enthralling on every level, SEX AND LUCIA is a stirring love story that dazzles with its labyrinthine plot, breathtaking cinematography and erotic passion.
ForeignParis, 1967. Disillusioned by their suburban lifestyles, a group of middle-class students, led by Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky), form a small Maoist cell and plan to change the world by any means necessary. After studying the growth of communism in China, the students decide they must use terrorism and violence to ignite their own revolution. Director Jean-Luc Godard, whose advocacy of Maoism bordered on intoxication, infuriated many traditionalist critics with this swiftly paced satire.
ForeignFrom Pedro Almodóvar, the director of the Academy-Award(r) winning All About My Mother (Best Foreign Language Film, 2000), comes his most acclaimed film yet. TALK TO HER is the surprising, altogether original and quietly moving story of the spoken and unspoken bonds that unite the lives and loves of two couples. Two men (Benigno and Marco) almost meet while watching a dance performance, but their lives are irrevocably entwined by fate. They meet later at a private clinic where Benigno is the caregiver for Alicia, a beautiful dance student who lies in a coma. Marco is there to visit his girlfriend, Lydia, a famous matador, also rendered motionless. As the men wage vigil over the women they love, the story unfolds in flashback and flashforward as the lives of the four are further entwined and their relationships move toward a surprising conclusion.
ForeignThe year is 1912. A 136 million-year old pterodactyl egg, housed on a shelf in the Natural History Museum, has mysteriously hatched, unleashing a prehistoric monster onto the Parisian streets. But nothing fazes Adèle, when she finds a connection with the ancient bird and reveals many more extraordinary surprises. . .
ForeignThe light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical n
ForeignNovember is set in a pagan Estonian village where werewolves, the plague, and spirits roam. Rainer Sarnet’s third feature film is a bold, twisted fairy tale about unrequited love. In November, the villagers’ main problem is how to survive the cold, dark winter. And, to that aim, nothing is taboo. People steal from each other, from their German manor lords, from spirits, the devil, and from Christ. They are willing to give away their souls to thieving creatures made of wood and metal called kratts, who help their masters, whose soul they purchased, steal even more. A young farmgirl Liina (Rea Lest) is hopelessly in love with Hans (Jörgen Liik), a nearby farmhand, whose heart she loses to the daughter of the German manor lord. In order to regain his love, Liina turns to any means necessary, even if that means tapping into the black magic that is circling around the village. Estonian pagan legends and Christian mythologies come to a spell-binding intersection in November.
ForeignSpanish surrealist master Luis Buñuel’s fiendish tale of love gone wrong is among the most perverse and unsettling films he made during his two decades of exile in Mexico. Folding his own neuroses into an adaptation of Mercedes Pinto’s autobiographical novel, Buñuel crafts an expressionistically stylized nightmare in which a young woman (Delia Garcés) discovers that the outward sophistication of her new husband (Arturo de Córdova) masks disturbing depths of jealousy and paranoia. A characteristically raw indictment of religious and social hypocrisy, Él stands as the director’s greatest excursion into melodrama, a vivid portrayal of society’s inability to restrain the irrational urges of the human id.
ForeignAfter the tragic loss of her daughter, Miyabi’s life takes a dark turn as she divorces and begins working as a call girl. A new customer's request for photographs of her body escalates quickly, leading Miyabi to feel the spirit of her daughter with each encounter. As she grapples with her grief and her daughter's presence, Miyabi must decide how far she's willing to go to reconnect with her beloved child.
ForeignA riveting character study in the guise of a gritty underworld thriller, Jacques Audiard’s international breakthrough is a bold reimagining of a New Hollywood cult classic. Romain Duris delivers an explosive performance as a real-estate broker torn between the dirty dealings of his slumlord father and his recently rekindled love for classical piano. Can music offer salvation from a life of sin?
ForeignWhen Commissaire Pierre Niemans (Jean Reno, 'Léon: The Professional'), France’s leading serial killer investigator, is called to examine a grisly murder, he enters a world of secrets, lies and unthinkable horrors. The dead, whose hands and eyes have been removed, are clues to a terrible tradition the killer can no longer bear. Each murder means something more; each victim, a guilty conspirator in a grand immoral experiment. Filled with blood-chilling suspense, twisted turns and breathtaking locations in the French Alps, this tense thriller has the style, action and intelligence to keep you wondering what’s really happening right up until its shocking conclusion. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz ('La haine') and featuring Vincent Cassel ('Eastern Promises'), Nadia Farès ('The Nest'), Dominique Sanda ('The Conformist'), Philippe Nahon ('I Stand Alone') and Jean-Pierre Cassel ('Army of Shadows').
ForeignIf you could choose only one memory to hold on to for eternity, what would it be? That’s the question at the heart of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s revelatory international breakthrough, a bittersweet fantasia in which the recently deceased find themselves in a limbo realm where they must select a single cherished moment from their life to be recreated on film for them to take into the next world. AFTER LIFE’s high-concept premise is grounded in Kore‑eda’s documentary-like approach to the material, which he shaped through interviews with hundreds of Japanese citizens. What emerges is a panoramic vision of the human experience — its ephemeral joys and lingering regrets — and a quietly profound meditation on memory, our interconnectedness, and the amberlike power of cinema to freeze time.
ForeignThe most personal film by the underworld poet Jean-Pierre Melville, who had participated in the French Resistance himself, this tragic masterpiece, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, recounts the struggles and sacrifices of those who fought in the Resistance. Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and the incomparable Simone Signoret star as intrepid underground fighters who must grapple with their conception of honor in their battle against Hitler’s regime. Long underappreciated in France and unseen in the United States, the atmospheric and gripping thriller ARMY OF SHADOWS is now widely recognized as the summit of Melville’s career, channeling the exquisite minimalism of his gangster films to create an unsparing tale of defiance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
ForeignMatteo Garrone's Gomorrah is a stark, shocking vision of contemporary gangsterdom, and one of cinema's most authentic depictions of organized crime. In this tour de force adaptation of undercover Italian reporter Roberto Saviano's best-selling exposé of Naples' Mafia underworld (known as the Camorra), Garrone links five disparate tales in which men and children are caught up in a corrupt system that extends from the housing projects to the world of haute couture. Filmed with an exquisite detachment interrupted by bursts of violence, Gomorrah is a shattering, socially engaged true-crime story from a major new voice in Italian cinema.
ForeignIn the fifth of their immortal collaborations, Federico Fellini and the exquisitely expressive Giulietta Masina completed the creation of one of the most indelible characters in all of cinema: Cabiria, an irrepressible, fiercely independent sex worker who, as she moves through the sea of Rome’s humanity, through adversity and heartbreak, must rely on herself—and her own indomitable spirit—to stay standing. Winner of the best actress prize at Cannes for Masina and the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA brought the early, neorealist-influenced phase of Fellini’s career to a transcendent close with its sublimely heartbreaking yet hopeful final image, which embodies, perhaps more than any other in the director’s body of work, the blend of the bitter and the sweet that define his vision of the world.
ForeignTale of Cinema uses the trope of a film within a film to tell two stories, that of a depressive young man (Ki-woo Lee) who forms a suicide pact with a friend (Ji-won Uhm); and the tale of a filmmaker (Kim Sangkyung) who sees a film that he believes was based on his life, and who meets the actress from the film with view to turning their onscreen relationship into reality.
ForeignIn the rural alpine hamlet of Mizubiki, not far from Tokyo, Takumi and his daughter, Hana, lead a modest life gathering water, wood, and wild wasabi for the local udon restaurant. Increasingly, the townsfolk become aware of a talent agency’s plan to build an opulent glamping site nearby, offering city residents a comfortable "escape" to the snowy wilderness. When two company representatives arrive and ask for local guidance, Takumi becomes conflicted in his involvement, as it becomes clear that the project will have a pernicious impact on the community. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow up to his Academy Award®-winning DRIVE MY CAR is a foreboding fable on humanity's mysterious, mystical relationship with nature. As sinister gunshots echo from the forest, both the locals and representatives confront their life choices and the haunting consequences they have.
ForeignSophie Marceau's first screen performance as the fourteen year old school girl Vic won her international acclaim. Vic lives with her parents but she gets along much better with Poupette, her great-grandmother. Vic confides in the energetic old lady and shares all her joys and feelings with the very open-minded dowager while her parents muddle through the cross-purposes of their love life.
Foreign“Visionary” barely begins to describe this masterpiece of Chinese cinema and martial arts moviemaking. A Touch of Zen by King Hu depicts the journey of Yang (Hsu Feng), a fugitive noblewoman who seeks refuge in a remote, and allegedly haunted, village. The sanctuary she finds with a shy scholar and two aides in disguise is shattered when a nefarious swordsman uncovers her identity, pitting the four against legions of blade-wielding opponents. At once a wuxia film, the tale of a spiritual quest, and a study in human nature, A Touch of Zen is an unparalleled work in Hu’s formidable career and an epic of the highest order, characterized by breathtaking action choreography, stunning widescreen landscapes, and innovative editing.
ForeignFour friends, all teachers at various stages of middle age, are stuck in a rut. Unable to share their passions either at school or at home, they embark on an audacious experiment from an obscure philosopher: to see if a constant level of alcohol in their blood will help them find greater freedom and happiness. At first they each find a new- found zest, but as the gang pushes their experiment further, issues that have been simmering for years come to a head and the men are faced with a choice: reckon with their behavior or continue on the same course.
Underscored by delicate and affecting camerawork, director Thomas Vinterberg's spry script, co-written with regular collaborator Tobias Lindholm, uses this bold premise to explore the euphoria and pain of an unbridled life. Playing a once brilliant but now world-weary shell of a man, the ever surprising Mads Mikkelsen delivers a fierce and touching performance.
ForeignIn CANTINFLAS, the true story of Mexico's greatest and most beloved comedy film star is told for the first time. From his humble origins on the small stage to the bright lights of Hollywood, Cantinflas became famous around the world - one joke at a time. Relive the laughter that has charmed generations.
ForeignMarseille. Heaps of flowers and funeral wreaths... A Mafia funeral in 1934. While François Capella's casket is gradually lowered, Roch Siffredi, dressed in black, stands motionless holding his hat and swears to revenge his friend. "A man who no longer defends his colors is no longer a man." But life goes on and Roch is at the peak of his success, controlling the whole city with its houses of prostitution, gambling dens and even the Alcazar, a new vaudeville theatre which is all the rage with the people of Marseille. Roch Siffredi chooses the first favourable opportunity to dispose, in an offensive manner, of the killer responsible for his associate's death. This killer is employed by Giovanni Volpone, a newcomer in Marseille with German ideas and American methods and capital. The reaction is sudden and brutal. Like a hurricane, Volpone destroys Siffredi's empire in a single night. But the oath Siffredi made to revenge his friend is always on his mind.
ForeignPedro Almodovar is at the top of his game with "All About My Mother," a poignant, at times comedic examination of women in intimate relationships. "All About My Mother" visits themes of female vulnerability and solidarity, but in a new and profoundly mature way. Cecilia Roth plays strong-willed hospital worker Manuela, whose 18-year-old son's accidental death transforms her life. Reading her son's journals, grief-stricken Manuela realizes that he longed to hear about the father he never knew. Forsaking Madrid for Barcelona, she embarks on a search for the man she left almost 20 years before.
ForeignThis film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is the most widely renowned work in the history of Cuban cinema. After his wife and family flee in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the bourgeois intellectual Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) passes his days wandering Havana in idle reflection, his amorous entanglements and political ambivalence gradually giving way to a mounting sense of alienation. With this adaptation of an innovative novel by Edmundo Desnoes, Gutiérrez Alea developed a cinematic style as radical as the times he was chronicling, creating a collage of vivid impressions through the use of experimental editing techniques, archival material, and spontaneously shot street scenes. Intimate and densely layered, Memories of Underdevelopment provides a biting indictment of its protagonist’s disengagement and an extraordinary glimpse of life in postrevolutionary Cuba.
ForeignVersailles, August 1715. Back from hunting, Louis XIV–masterfully portrayed by French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud (The 400 Blows) - feels a pain in his leg. A serious fever erupts, which marks the beginning of agony for the greatest King of France. Surrounded by a horde of doctors and his closest counselors, who sense an impending power vacuum, the Sun King struggles to run the country from his bed.
Based on extensive medical records and the memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon and other courtiers, The Death of Louis XIV is a wry neoclassical chamber drama, a work of pure magic by Albert Serra, one of today’s most singular directors.
ForeignStepping from the pages of Fredrik Backman’s international best-selling novel, Ove is the quintessential grumpy old man next door, with strictly enforced principles and a short fuse. Still grieving his late wife, Ove has largely given up on life until a boisterous young family moves in next door and forces him out of his shell in this heartwarming tale that reminds us that life is sweeter when it's shared.
ForeignAs Magdalena's (Emily Rios) 15th birthday approaches, her working class family prepares for the all-important QUINCEAÑERA - a lavish coming-of-age celebration. To help with expenses, Magdalena is forced to wear a hand-me-down party dress and abandon her dream of arriving in a Hummer limousine. But when her father discovers she's pregnant and refuses to believe the incredible truth - she's actually still a virgin - Magdalena moves in with her elderly Uncle Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez) and black sheep cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia). Her newfound family is soon put to the test, however, when an unexpected crisis threatens to tear them apart, and Magdalena learns what it truly means to come of age.
ForeignEric Rohmer captures the ache of summertime sadness with exquisite poignancy in this luminous tale of self-exploration. The Jules Verne novel of the same name provides the loose inspiration for the story of Delphine (Marie Rivière), a dreamy, introverted young secretary who, reeling from a breakup with her boyfriend, faces the anxiety-inducing prospect of spending her summer vacation alone. As she bounces from a getaway in Cherbourg to the tourist-choked Alps to the sunny beaches of Biarritz, Delphine passes through a whirl of social activity—but through it all remains profoundly alone, searching for the true human connection that seems to perpetually elude her. As honest a portrait of loneliness, depression, and the longing for understanding as has ever been committed to film, THE GREEN RAY stands as one of the most piercingly perceptive works by the French cinema’s keenest observer of human relationships.
ForeignAlong the banks of the Suzhou River, which winds precariously through Shanghai, Mardar (Jia Hongshen) falls in love with a dramatically beautiful young woman named Moudan (Zhou Xun). When he tries to kidnap her in order to demand ransom money from her rich father, she escapes him, jumping in to the river and disappearing forever. Mardar serves a three-year jail sentence for his attempted crime. Upon his release, he meets a woman that looks exactly like Moudan, named MeiMei (also played by Zhou Xun).An exciting, action-filled mystery suspense movie, director Lou Ye's Suzhou River shares many thematic and stylistic elements with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
ForeignThrough the eyes of a doctor who worked in São Paulo's infamous House of Detention for 12 years, Carandiru tells stories of crime, revenge, love and friendship, culminating in the fateful 1992 massacre that left 111 people dead. Hector Babenco, whose direction won him a nomination for the Palme d'Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, makes use of striking images to tell each story that makes up Carandiru Station, the book by Dr. Drauzio Varella that spent 168 weeks on the bestseller list in Brazil and is one of the most successful titles in Brazil's history. Gathering together the doctor's stories of Latin America's largest prison, Babenco composes a sweeping and varied tapestry, full of humor and pathos, but always driven by a humanistic sense and a belief in redemption.
ForeignDuring World War II, millions of Jews are deported and killed in German concentration camps. BETRAYED is based on the true story about the Braude family. An ordinary Norwegian family whose fate is sealed by the fact that they are Jews.
ForeignFrom Oliver Laxe, the Academy Award nominated director of SIRAT, MIMOSAS - winner of the Critics Week Grand Prize at Cannes - is a spellbinding tale of a mysterious caravan tasked with transporting a dying sheikh through Morocco's unforgiving Atlas Mountains. Somewhere in the desert, a caravan is escorting an elderly sheik to the village where he was born. His last wish is to be buried with his loved ones. But death does not wait. Without their leader, the company grows fearful. And at the foot of a mountain pass, they refuse to continue, entrusting the body to two men who agree to carry on and bring it to its final destination. But who are these men? And do they really know the way? In another world, a mysterious young man is chosen to find the caravan.
ForeignBursting with the colorful street style & music of Nairobi’s vibrant youth culture, RAFIKI is a tender love story between two young women in a country that still criminalizes homosexuality. Kena and Ziki have long been told that “good Kenyan girls become good Kenyan wives” - but they yearn for something more. Despite the political rivalry between their families, the girls encourage each other to pursue their dreams in a conservative society. When love blossoms between them, Kena and Ziki must choose between happiness and safety.
Initially banned in Kenya for its positive portrayal of queer romance, RAFIKI won a landmark supreme court case chipping away at Kenyan anti-LGBT legislation. Featuring remarkable performances by newcomers Samantha Mugatsia and Sheila Munyiva, RAFIKI is a hip tale of first love “reminiscent of the early work of Spike Lee” (Screen Daily) that’s “impossible not to celebrate” (Variety)!
ForeignBalancing physical action with Buddhist musings on life and death, the most spiritual of the Lone Wolf and Cub films finds Ogami’s combat skills put to the test by five different warrior-messengers.
ForeignDirected by Oscar®-winner Pierre Schoendoerffer, and based on his novel of the same name, THE 317th PLATOON captures the terror and chaos of the last days of the French war in Indochina. This is a classic war film that influenced later American cinema on Vietnam.
1954. The dying days of the French war in Indochina. As the battle of Diên Biên Phu rages, the 317th platoon of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps are ordered to destroy their base and evacuate. The French and Laotian soldiers must brave the Cambodian jungle on foot to reach the safety of French-held Tao Tsai, hoping to get there before the town falls.
The men are optimistic as they set out. But what should be a 48-hour trek goes wrong almost from the start. After running into a Viet Minh supply base, the 317th platoon take casualties. Their rookie leader, the idealistic sub-lieutenant Torrens (Jacques Perrin) has spent all of 18 days in Indochina and insists on carrying the wounded. He clashes with his adjutant
ForeignGodefroy de Montmirail is about to marry Frénégonde de Pouille when the Duke, her father, interrupts the wedding preparation. Someone has "stoleneth" the sacred relic of Sainte Rolande which assures the fecundity of the de Pouille women. It is now the property of Bernie 'the scallop" and Ginette, in the present. Calamity! The corridors of time are not shut and it can only spell the worst possible disasters. And to top it all off, Bernardin, the descendant of Bernie, came back with Godefroy and is stranded in the Middle Ages. Godefroy decides to return to the present for a harrowing second voyage in The Corridors of Time, the sequel to The Visitors.
ForeignWhen Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) capsizes off the coast of Normandy, David (Benjamin Voisin) comes to the rescue and soon opens the younger boy’s eyes to a new horizon of friendship, art, and sexual bliss. David’s worldly demeanor and Jewish heritage deliver an ardent jolt to Alexis’s traditional, working-class upbringing. After Alexis begins working at the seaside shop owned by David’s mother (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), the two lovers steal every possible moment for a fugitive kiss, a motorcycle ride, or a trip to the cinema. Their relationship is soon rocked by a host of challenges, including an unexpected sexual rival (Philippine Velge) and a romantic oath that transcends life itself. Adapted by François Ozon from Aidan Chambers’s groundbreaking LGBT young adult novel Dance on My Grave, SUMMER OF 85 is a sexy, nostalgic reverie of first love and its consequences from one of France’s most versatile filmmakers. Their summer fling lasts just six weeks, but casts a shadow over a
ForeignIn THE QUEEN OF SPAIN, Penelope Cruz is the famous movie star Macarena Granada, who flees the glitz and glamour of 1950s Hollywood to return to her roots in Spain where she has signed on to star in an epic film as Queen Isabella of Spain.
Foreign15-year-old Mia and her parents move to the suburbs of Zürich. While Mia plunges into a wild teenager existence, her body begins to change oddly. First hardly noticeably, but then with a force that threatens to drive her out of her mind. Mia’s transformation progresses inexorably, and she turns into the being which has slumbered within her for years... and is now gaining the upper hand.
ForeignRinko and Shigehiko are a strange couple, who connect as human beings but not lovers. They live more like friends and lead nearly independent lives. Both seem comfortable with this coexistence until Rinko receives a package of candid photographs of herself masturbating. The sender contacts her with the threat of exposing them to her husband so she submits herself to the anonymous voyeur's sexual games in order for the negatives and prints to be returned. Rinko is to comply with a set of assignments that place her constantly on the borderline between humiliation and pleasure. The voyeur knows exactly what Rinko's personal erotic fantasies are and makes her act them out one by one.
ForeignSet against the backdrop of the beautiful Mediterranean, Swept Away is Lina Wertmuller's most famous and controversial film about sex, love and politics. On an elegant yacht cruising off the coast of Sardinia, Raffaella (Mariangela Melato), a rich and stunning capitalist, enjoys tormenting Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini), a Communist sailor. Fate weaves a different scenario and roles become reversed when the two find themselves stranded together on a deserted island. Raffaella must submit to Gennarino in order to survive, which culminates in a dramatic climax when they are rescued. They must determine if their love can survive the harsh realities of civilization.
ForeignGod exists! Sadly, he is a real scoundrel. A misanthropic family man living in Brussels, he is a petty and tyrannical force in the lives of the masses. From a computer in his apartment's private office, God (Benoît Poelvoorde) invents new laws of the universe to toy with humanity (Law no. 2127: "The required amount of sleep is always 10 more minutes"). He is no better with his put-upon wife and rebellious 10-year-old daughter Ea, his lesser-known offspring. Disgusted by her father's antics, Ea hacks into his computer, leaking the predestined death dates of everyone in the world and embarking on a quest to draft a new testament with a modern band of apostles. Now freed from the uncertainty of death, the values and priorities of mankind begin to shift in this hilarious and visionary romp from director Jaco Van Dormael.
ForeignWith TEOREMA, a coolly cryptic exploration of bourgeois spiritual emptiness, Pier Paolo Pasolini moved beyond the poetic, proletarian earthiness that first won him renown. Terence Stamp stars as the mysterious stranger—perhaps an angel, perhaps a devil—who, one by one, seduces the members of a wealthy Milanese family (including European cinema icons Silvana Mangano, Massimo Girotti, Laura Betti, and Anne Wiazemsky), precipitating an existential crisis in each of their lives. Unfolding nearly wordlessly, this tantalizing metaphysical riddle—blocked from exhibition by the Catholic Church for degeneracy—is at once a blistering Marxist treatise on sex, religion, and art and a primal scream into the void.
ForeignJulie (Laure Calamy) can’t catch a break. For a single mother raising two children in the suburbs of Paris but working in the city, the commuter train is a lifeline–and it’s suddenly been severed during the latest transit strike. Without the train, Julie can’t get to her job as the head maid at a five-star hotel–or to the interview for a better job she has lined up. Out of desperation, Julie turns to neighbors and her own gutsy resourcefulness to commute into the city for work, barely making it back in time to pick up her kids before dinner. Worse yet: it’s only Monday. Julie is at her breaking point and soon finds herself bending the rules to stay afloat in a ruthless society as her responsibilities pile up. Anchored by Calamy’s powerful performance, Full Time is an impossible race against time and a kinetic thriller assembled from the everyday obstacles faced by working parents everywhere.
ForeignDissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: the tenth feature in six years by genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard is a stylish mash-up of anticonsumerist satire, au courant politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, "the last romantic couple." With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, PIERROT LE FOU is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.
ForeignThe mysteries of everyday life come into astonishing focus in one of Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest cinematic achievements. A slyly self-reflexive commentary on the director’s own artistic practice, THE WIND WILL CARRY US unfolds with unhurried majesty as it follows an undercover documentarian (Behzad Dorani) whose assignment to cover a small village’s funeral rites is continually frustrated by an elderly woman’s refusal to die. Along the way, though, he forges surprising, unsettling, and enlightening connections with those he meets. Suffused with Kiarostami’s love for people, poetry, and the arid beauty of rural Iran, this meditative masterpiece reflects upon the boundaries between intimacy and alienation, tradition and modernity, with the utmost grace.
ForeignAs a wealthy Swedish family celebrates the birthday of their patriarch Alexander (Erland Josephson, Cries and Whispers), news of the outbreak of World War III reaches their remote Baltic island — and the happy mood turns to horror. The family descends into a state of psychological devastation, brilliantly evoked by Tarkovsky's arresting palette of luminous greys washing over the bleak landscape around their home. (The film's masterful cinematography is by Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's longtime collaborator).
ForeignSure to be remembered as a landmark in Chinese cinema, this intensely felt epic marks a career cut tragically short: its debut director Hu Bo took his own life last October, at the age of 29. The protagonist of this modern reworking of the tale of Jason and the Argonauts is teenage Wei Bu, who critically injures a school bully by accident. Over a single, eventful day, he crosses paths with a classmate, an elderly neighbor, and the bully’s older brother, all of them bearing their own individual burdens, and all drawn as if by gravity to the city of Manzhouli, where a mythical elephant is said to sit, indifferent to a cruel world. Full of moody close-ups and virtuosic tracking shots, An Elephant Sitting Still is nothing short of a masterpiece.
ForeignAn expert observer of unembellished humanity, writer-director Mike Leigh reached new levels of expressive power and intricacy with this exploration of the deceptions, small and large, that shape our relationships. When Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a Black optometrist who was adopted as a child, begins the search for her birth mother, she doesn’t expect that it will lead her to Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress award), a lonely white factory worker whose tentative embrace of her long-lost daughter sends shock waves through the rest of her already fragile family. Born from a painstaking process of rehearsal and improvisation with a powerhouse ensemble cast, SECRETS & LIES is a Palme d’Or–winning tour de force of sustained tension and catharsis that lays bare the emotional fault lines running beneath everyday lives.
ForeignFifty years ago, the Japanese Defense Forces killed Godzilla or so they thought. When a series of terrifying natural disasters begin to plague Japan, including the inexplicable offshore sinking of a U.S. submarine, a mystic old man warns his nation that Godzilla has come back to destroy Japan as revenge for all the souls lost in the Pacific War. When mere military might can not squash the monster, the mystic man awakens the Holy Beasts of Yamato - King Ghidorah, Mothra and Baragon, sleeping giants that protected Japan in ancient times. These untamed mammoth beasts take on Godzilla with frightening supernatural brute power that has been 2,000 years in the making. Tradition and technology collide in this chilling high-tech, cutting-edge fable.
ForeignFrom critically acclaimed, erotically candid writer/director Pedro Almodóvar (Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down; Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) comes a raw, seductive tale based on a novel by British mystery writer Ruth Rendell. When naive, lovestruck Victor (Liberto Rabal) attempts to seduce beautiful and wealthy but strung-out junkie Elena (Francesca Neri), all he gets for his trouble is a one-way, six-year ticket to prison, where he concentrates on strengthening his mind, his body...and his desire for vengeance on the man who put him there. After his release, Victor crosses paths with Elena, who is as beautiful as ever since she cleaned up her act. Still madly in love with her, Victor will stop at nothing to win her over even if it means revenge for Elena has married David (Javier Bardem), the cop who sent him to prison!
ForeignThis short film is the first segment of five in the multinational feature LOVE AT TWENTY (1962), all five segments on the theme of first adult love. After indulging in much delinquency in his youth, seventeen-year-old Antoine Doinel, having been provided opportunity to get out of that delinquent life, is now an upstanding member of society working for Philips Records, which allows him to indulge in his love of music. At the Youth Concerts, he has noticed the same young woman at several performances. She is Colette and the two begin to date. Colette treats Antoine like a buddy, while Antoine has fallen in love with her. His pursuit of getting Colette to be his exclusive girlfriend is helped on the surface by the fact that Colette's parents like him and encourage their dating. He uses grand romantic gestures to try and prove his love. Will Colette ultimately fall for Antoine's romanticism?
ForeignThe ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds the voices of the Earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of a mysterious button that was discovered in its seabed. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline, the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian indigenous people, of the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.
ForeignOne of six sublime color masterworks that Yasujiro Ozu produced late in his career, the director’s second filming of his own 1934 silent triumph A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS represents the mature flowering of his style. Harnessing the full expressive potential of color, sound, music, and his exquisite compositional sense, he brings new depths of bittersweet feeling—tinged with an aging artist’s melancholic nostalgia—as well as a new air of expansiveness, to a story with enduring resonance.
ForeignThe first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing KOKER TRILOGY takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns, aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility. Sensitive and profound, WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE? is shot through with all the beauty, tension, and wonder a single day can contain.
ForeignBased on the classic novel, UNKOWN SOLDIER follows the story of Rokka, Kariluoto, Koskela, Hietanen, and their brothers-in-arms. It shows how friendship, humour, and the will to live unite these men on their way there and back. The war changes the lives of each of the soldiers as well as the lives of those on the home front, and also leaves its mark on the entire nation.
ForeignEdward Yang’s first foray into comedy may have been a surprising stylistic departure, but in its richly novelistic vision of urban discontent, it is quintessential Yang. This relationship roundelay centers on a coterie of young Taipei professionals whose paths converge at an entertainment company where the boundaries between art and commerce, love and business, have become hopelessly blurred. Evoking the chaos of a city infiltrated by Western chains, logos, and attitudes, A Confucian Confusion is an incisive reflection on the role of traditional values in a materialistic, amoral society.
ForeignIn the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that left fifty thousand dead, Abbas Kiarostami returned to Koker, where his camera surveys not only devastation but also the teeming life in its wake. Blending fiction and reality into a playful, poignant road movie, AND LIFE GOES ON follows a film director who, along with his son, makes the trek to the region in hopes of finding out if the young boys who acted in WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE? are among the survivors, and discovers a resilient community pressing on in the face of tragedy. Finding beauty in the bleakest of circumstances, Kiarostami crafts a quietly majestic ode to the best of the human spirit.
ForeignLoving grandmother Michelle is enjoying a peaceful retirement in Burgundy. When her antagonistic daughter and young grandson come to visit, family ties are tested as Michelle plots a path towards restoring the family life so long denied her. Beneath a deceptively placid surface, master stylist François Ozon cooks up a twisty and destabilizing thriller.
ForeignDreverhaven is dead. The city's most feared bailiff, the curse of the poor, the agent of law without compassion, discovered with a knife through his heart. A self-taught lawyer who just passes his exams was the last person to see Dreverhaven alive. Now, the police want to know why he visited the oldman, and the young barrister is ready to tell the story of a lifetime. Based on the popular classic 1938 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk, this emotional powerhouse of a drama portrays a timeless struggle between father and son, a struggle even the father knows the son is destined to win. Beautifully set in Rotterdam of the 1920s, this visually stunning film delivers us deep into the heart of a Dickensian world, austere and cruel yet still touchingly human. Fredja van Huêt and Jan Decleir star in writer/director Mike van Diem's Academy Award®-winning feature debut.
ForeignFinal day of school in a small Polish town. It's the very last chance for 12-Year-Old Gabrysia to tell her classmate that she had fallen in love with him. She sets up a secret meeting and blackmails her love interest to show up. But what was supposed to be an intimate talk spins out of control and this seemingly normal day in the lives of three ordinary elementary school students culminates in shocking and terrifying events.
Foreign"The Flower of My Secret" is the new film from Pedro Almodovar, Spanish director of such avant garde hits as "Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and High Heels. Leo (Marisa Paredes) is a bestselling author of romantic fiction, but has been writing under a pseudonym name for years. Now in the middle of her life, Leo has reached a creative and emotional crisis. Tired of producing popular fiction when her heart yearns to write truly great literature, her very success has become a burden to her; unable to accept that her marriage to Paco (Imanol Arias) is rapidly disintegrating, Leo finds herself at a crossroads in her life. Even Leo's mother and sister can offer no consolation as they constantly bicker with one another. The one ray of hope in Leo's life comes from Angel (Juan Echanove), the editor of the newspaper El Pais, who offers her a job as a critic for a national arts supplement. Leo's first assignment brings her face to face with her alter-ego causing an examination of her
ForeignThis bittersweet farce from Academy Award®-nominated director Jiang Yimou (Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern) stars Zhao Benshan as Zhao, an aging bachelor who entices his beloved by pretending to be wealthy and agreeing to an expensive wedding. He tries to raise the money by refurbishing an abandoned bus and renting it out by the hour "The Happy Times Hotel" to young couples starved for privacy. Meanwhile, Zhao's fiancee insists that he take her beautiful blind stepdaughter, Wu Ying (Dong Jie), to the Happy Times Hotel and give her a job. Zhao reluctantly agrees, then creates a series of deceptions to keep the girl occupied. As the subterfuge unravels, unexpected truths come to light as a real empathy grows between the young woman and the older man.
ForeignThe crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film’s earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory. With stark, visceral cinematography that pits blinding white snow against pitch-black despair, THE ASCENT finds poetry and transcendence in the harrowing trials of war.
ForeignIn 1975, Pierre Goldman, a fiery and controversial figure of revolutionary left-wing activism, was put on trial in France. Accused of multiple crimes including two murders, Goldman proclaims his innocence. The Goldman trial reflects the political, ideological and racial tensions that marked the 1970s in France and Europe. Considered to be the trial of the century, it divided an entire country and widened the gap between the conservative right and left-wing intellectuals.
