Drama

  • Sam Garbarski – Quartier lointain aka A Distant Neighborhood (2010)

    2001-2010DramaFantasyFranceSam Garbarski

    By chance, fifty-year old Thomas finds himself back in the little town of his childhood. While visiting his mother’s grave he faints and wakes up to find himself in the past. Thomas is 14 again, an adolescent who has kept all his adult experience and character. He meets up with his classmates, the girl with whom he was secretly in love, and above all his parents – his mother, so young and full of life; his father, who had disappeared back then, never to return. Thomas tries to find out the real reasons for his father’s departure. But can he relive his past without changing it?Read More »

  • Cristian Nemescu – California Dreamin’ (Nesfarsit) (2007)

    2001-2010Cristian NemescuDramaRomania

    Plot Synopsis from allmovie.com
    Romanian director Cristian Nemescu’s comedy California Dreamin’ unfolds against the backdrop of the Kosovo War, circa 1999. A NATO train rolls through a Romanian hamlet, transporting a plethora of weapons across the country – without official documents, and equipped only with the verbal consent of the Romanian authorities. The transport thus grows intensely vulnerable to the locals – particularly the head of the railway station, who moonlights as a mobster.Read More »

  • Andrew Bujalski – Support the Girls (2018)

    2011-2020Andrew BujalskiComedyDramaUSA

    Quote:
    In Bujalski’s new film (notable director of Computer Chess, Funny Ha Ha, and Mutual Appreciation), the general manager at a highway-side ”sports bar with curves” has her incurable optimism and faith, in her girls, her customers, and herself, tested over the course of a long, strange day.Read More »

  • Jacques Rivette – La religieuse AKA The Nun (1966)

    1961-1970DramaFranceJacques Rivette

    Quote:
    It was Rivette’s second feature, after the puzzling ‘Paris Nous Appartient,’ and eschewed the nouvelle vague in favour of something altogether more structured, indeed rigorously so. “This film is a work of imagination,” the opening caption informs us, “not a portrait of religious institutions, 18th century or other. It should be viewed from a double perspective; history and romance.”Read More »

  • Sólveig Anspach – Louise Michel, la rebelle AKA Louise Michel (2009)

    2001-2010DramaFranceSólveig Anspach

    A fiercely active Communard, Louise Michel is condemned for taking arms against Bismarck. Along with thousands of other revolutionaries, she is deported to New Caledonia, whilst, back in Paris, a young parliamentarian Georges Clemenceau campaigns for a truce with the Communards. During her exile, Louise Michel becomes a teacher and wins the admiration of the other deportees, inspiring them to rise up against the colonial order…Read More »

  • Fred Zinnemann – The Nun’s Story (1959)

    1951-1960ClassicsDramaFred ZinnemannUSA

    From IMDB:
    In 1930, in Belgium, Gabrielle van der Mal is the stubborn daughter of the prominent surgeon Dr. Pascin Van Der Mal that decides to leave her the upper-class family to enter to a convent, expecting to work as nun in Congo with tropical diseases. She says good-bye to her sisters Louise and Marie; to her brother Pierre; and to her beloved father, and subjects herself to the stringent rules of the retrograde institution, including interior silent and excessive humbleness and humiliation. After a long period working in a mental institution, Gaby is finally assigned to go to Congo, where she works with the Atheist and cynical, but brilliant, Dr. Fortunati.Read More »

  • Pedro Costa – No Quarto da Vanda AKA In Vanda’s Room (2000)

    1991-2000DocumentaryDramaPedro CostaPortugal

    Quote:
    For the extraordinarily beautiful second film in his Fontainhas trilogy, Pedro Costa jettisoned his earlier films’ larger crews to burrow even deeper into the Lisbon ghetto and the lives of its desperate inhabitants. With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, In Vanda’s Room takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but is centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. Costa presents the daily routines of Vanda and her neighbors with disarming matter-of-factness, and through his camera, individuals whom many would deem disposable become vivid and vital. This was Costa’s first use of digital video, and the evocative images he created remain some of the medium’s most astonishing.—The Criterion CollectionRead More »

  • David Mackenzie – Young Adam (2003)

    2001-2010ArthouseDavid MackenzieDramaUnited Kingdom

    The adaptation of a novel by Alexander Trocchi, a figure of the Beat generation, David Mac Kenzie’s Young Adam slowly sails on turbid water, carrying in its wake some characters stuck in lives with hopeless futures.

    In 1950’s Scotland, Joe works on a barge owned by Les and Ella. The trio delivers coal bags along the channels between Glasgow and Edinburgh. One day, the two men fish out the corpse of a drowned woman. While Les waits impatiently to make headlines in the press, Joe launches into a secret affair with Ella.Read More »

  • Marco Ferreri – L’udienza AKA The Audience (1971)

    1971-1980DramaItalyMarco FerreriMystery

    This tiresome comedy features pop singer Enzo Jannacci as Amedeo, a country rube who comes to Vatican City seeking a personal audience with the Pope. Detailing Amedeo’s battle with officious Vatican bureaucrats and bungling attempts to catch the Pope off-guard, the film rarely rises to the level of director Marco Ferreri’s more subversive farces and resembles nothing more than a 1970s Neapolitan-style Pauly Shore vehicle. Italian film buffs will still appreciate the cast, which includes Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Piccoli of La Cage aux Folles as well as Claudia Cardinale, Vittorio Gassman, and Alain Cuny. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie GuideRead More »

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