Nominated for eight Oscars in 1986, including Best Picture, and winner of three (Costumes, Art Direction and Adapted Screenplay), A Room with a View is the film that defined Merchant-Ivory as the masters of the romantic period piece. A brilliant adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel, A Room with a View tells the story of the coming of age of Lucy ...
Our Take: One of the most sensual and romantic movies ever made, period.
Tom Tykwer directed this German thriller in which Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) handled a smuggling job, delivered the loot, collected the payment, left the bag on the subway, and now has 20 minutes to gather 100,000 deutsche marks or confront the wrath of his boss, local criminal Ronnie (Heino Ferch). Desperate, Manni phones his girlfriend Lola (Franka Potente) who immediately runs ...
Lee Holloway is a smart, quirky woman in her twenties who returns to her hometown in Florida after a brief stay in a mental hospital. In search of relief from herself and her oppressive childhood environment, she starts to date a nerdy friend from high school and takes a job as a secretary in a local law firm, soon developing ...
Our Take: A funny and romantic movie about loneliness, sex, power, pain and subordination, featuring Maggie Gyllenhall's star-making performance.
In a small town called Amal, Elin (Alexandra Dahlstrom) and her high school friends are part of the "in-crowd." Elin is the popular school debutante, and she is the rage with all the boys on campus. Agnes (Rebecca Liljeberg) is not part of the "in-crowd," she is considered an outcast. Young and pretty, but unconcerned of her social status, Agnes ...
Miles is a failed writer living a meager existence in San Diego as an English teacher. With his career seemingly fading and the fate of a book hinging on a publisher's decision, Miles is depressed with himself and what he hasn't achieved. Jack is a television actor whom some recognize but not many do, as if he were a minor ...
Our Take: We rarely see the friendship between two guys as the central plot point of a film, and even more rarely explored with such humor, keen observation and deft acting.
For his feature film debut, director Noam Murro assembles an impressive cast: Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, and Ellen Page. Quaid (VANTAGE POINT) stars as a brilliant-but-unhappy professor whose life begins to change--for the better--when he has a stroke. The experience allows him to reconnect with a former student (Parker) and his adopted brother (Church). JUNO breakout ...
After fifteen films of mostly local acclaim, the 1956 prize - winning comedy Smiles of a Summer Night at last ushered in an international audience for director Ingmar Bergman. Set in turn - of - the - century Sweden, four women and four men attempt to juggle the laws of attraction amidst their daily bourgeois life. When a weekend in ...
The true story of the troubled marriage of Jaap and Manja Polak, who lived in German occupied Amsterdam. During the war, Jaap met and fell in love with Ina Soep. In the Westerbork transit camp the husband, the wife and the girlfriend found themselves in the same barrack, as well as later in Bergen Belsen. This is their story as ...
Jia Zhang Ke's haunting minimalist drama Still Life takes as its focal point the real-life construction of the Three Gorges Hydro Project and it accompanying massive dam over the Yangtze River in China (allegedly the largest manmade dam in the world) -- a project that required engineers to flood the surrounding territories, including the two millennia-old city of Fengjie. Jia ...
The friendship and trust that develops rapidly between a 17-year-old homeless boy and a young mother with two children is the basis for Andre Techine's Strayed. They find each other during a terrifying WWII bombing as they are escaping Paris for the countryside. Yvan (Gaspard Ulliel) is a recluse hiding in the woods. Odile (Emmanuelle Beart) is ...
Scott Hastings is a champion caliber ballroom dancer, but much to the chagrin of the Australian ballroom dance community, Scott believes in dancing "his own steps". Fran is a beginning dancer and a bit of an ugly duckly who has the audacity to ask to be Scott's partner after his unorthodox style causes his regular partner to dance out of ...
The dynamic John Leguizamo is teamed with Mira Sorvino in an electrifying, must-see movie that takes you back to New York City's infamous summer of 1977! The heat is soaring to record highs, blackouts are filling the streets with looters ... and the murders of a man who calls himself the Son of Sam are gripping the giant city in ...
Lou Ye’s controversial Summer Palace is the story of young lovers whose relationship plays out against the movement for political reform, its violent suppression and the years of disillusionment that follow. After his film world premiered in the Cannes Film Festival’s competition, Lou Ye was banned from filmmaking for five years by Chinese authorities.
Inge (Elizabeth Reaser) is a feisty German mail-order bride who has come to Minnesota to marry Olaf (Tim Guinee), a young Norwegian immigrant farmer of few words. But in a post-WWI, anti-German climate, the local minister (John Heard) openly forbids the marriage. Inge and Olaf fall in love despite the town's disapproval. But when the town banker (Ned Beatty) attempts ...
Four short fables in which characters collide with fate – and each other – comprise The Air I Breathe, an ambitious and absorbing drama from debuting director/writer Jieho Lee. Boasting a brilliant ensemble cast, the film is inspired by a Chinese proverb that breaks life down into four key emotions – Happiness, Sorrow, Pleasure, and Love – and each vignette ...
C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon) knows the way to success in business... it's through the door of his apartment! By providing a perfect hide away for philandering bosses, the ambitious young employee reaps a series of undeserved promotions. But when Bud lends the key to big boss J.D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), he not only advances his career, but his own ...
Antoinette is the Duchess of Langeais, a married coquette who frequents the most extravagant balls in 1820's Paris during The Restoration, where hypocrisy and vanity reign. Upon the handsome general Armand de Montriveau's first meeting with her, he realized it was true love.
Our Take: French chanteuse, thespian, and indie-film gamine Jeanne Balibar has the smarts (her dad’s a Marxist philosopher, for Chrissake!) and the ethereal beauty of all the classic starlets. Combined. Here, she toys with poor, hobbled Guillaume Depardieu, handsome hero of the Napoleonic wars, who has a bad love crush on Balibar’s titular Parisian duchess. Nouvelle Vague saint Jacques Rivette directs, and the results are more than a little titillating.
A grief-stricken screenwriter unknowingly enters a three-way relationship with a woman and her film executive husband - to chilling results.
Johnny Rebel is the stuff dreams are made of: a chiseled Adonis and the biggest star in gay porn - even though he is straight. The fact the he's "gay-for-pay" matters little to Julie, his lap-dancer girlfriend who dreams of having his children. It matters even less to Johnny himself, who lives for the money, the drugs and the attention...from ...
Director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White, who had previously collaborated on Chuck and Buck, turn an eye toward suburban boredom with the quirky comedy The Good Girl. Jennifer Aniston stars as Justine, a woman who is feeling constrained by her life. Her husband, Phil (John C. Reilly), is a house painter who spends the majority of his time smoking ...
Our Take: Good girls never have it easy. Neither does Jennifer Aniston in her unconventional performance as a super-market clerk in small-town Texas who embarks on a love affair to find meaning and stimulation in her otherwise dead-end life.