Just out of jail after serving time on an assault rap, Max (Gene Hackman) is headed for Pittsburgh to open a deluxe car wash. Back from five years at sea, Lion (Al Pacino) wants to hit Detroit and visit the child he's never seen. The dreams may not be glorious but you'll want Max and Lion to fulfill them because 'Scarecrow', has a heart as big as its cross-country journey. It's hard-luck drifters drift permanently into our souls. This is due to teamwork of a high order: the moving performances of Hackman and Pacino, the sensitive direction of Jerry Schatzberg and the glowing landscape cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond. Hit the road with these two. You'll find the trip unforgettable.
Very different from the other Iranian films that get a release, this second film from London Film School graduate Ali Jaberansari is three intertwined stories of love and yearning set in Tehran but told in a deadpan comedic style more reminiscent of Jarmusch. Mina (Forough Ghajabagli) is a secretary in a beauty clinic who is struggling with her weight but is addicted to ice-cream. Leading a double life, she catfishes her male clientele over the phone with a seductive voice. Eventually she does meet a prospective partner, but things may not go smoothly. Hessam (Amir Hessam Bakhtiari) is a body builder, who now trains affluent older men. However, he seems willing to go the extra mile for a special new younger client. Vahid (Mehdi Saki) is a funeral singer who has been dumped by his fiancee. He is urged to liven up by trying a new career as a wedding singer. At one of these he meets the free spirited Niloufar (Behnaz Jafari), but is she a real prospect?
With revolutionary outrage, Ousmane Sembène chronicles a period during World War II when French colonial forces in Senegal conscripted young men of the Diola people and attempted to seize rice stores for soldiers back in Europe. As the tribe's patriarchal leaders pray and make sacrifices to their gods, the women in the community refuse to yield their harvests, incurring the French army's wrath. With a deep understanding of the oppressive forces that have shaped Senegalese history, Emitaï explores the strains that colonialism places upon cultural traditions and, in the process, discovers a people's hidden reserves of rebellion and dignity.
Long unavailable, this deeply felt coming-of-age drama by Olivier Assayas has until now been a missing link in one of contemporary cinema's richest bodies of work. Drawing from his own youthful experiences, Assayas revisits the outskirts of Paris in the early 1970's, telling the story of teenage lovers Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and Christine (Virginie Ledoyen), whose rebellions against family and society threaten to tear them apart. The visceral realism of the movie's narrative and the near experimentalism of its camera work come together effortlessly thanks in part to a rock soundtrack that vividly evokes the period. 'Cold Water', whose centerpiece is one of the most memorable party sequences ever committed to film, is a heartbreaking immersion in the emotional tumult of being young.
Black Bag is a gripping spy drama about legendary intelligence agents George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and his beloved wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). When she is suspected of betraying the nation. George faces the ultimate test-loyalty to his marriage or his country.
When Oskar Matzerath (the extraordinary David Bennent, just twelve at the time) receives a tin drum for his third birthday, he vows to stop growing there and then - and woe betide anyone who tries to take his beloved drum away from him, as he has a banshee shriek that can shatter glass. As a result, he retains a permanent child's-eye perspective on the rise of Nazism as experienced through petit-bourgeois life in his native Danzig, the 'free city' claimed by both Germany and Poland whose invasion in 1939 helped kick-start World War II. With the help of Luis Bunuel's favourite screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, director Volker Schlondorff turns Gunter Grass's magical-realist masterpiece into a carnivalesque frenzy of bizarre, grotesque yet unnervingly compelling images as Oskar turns his increasingly jaded eye and caustic tongue on the insane follies of the adult world that he refuses to join.
Set within the Asian community in London, 'My Beautiful Launderette' is an unusual love story concerned with identity and entrepreneurial spirit during the Thatcher years. Omar (Gordon Warnecke) takes over the running of his wheeler-dealer uncle's launderette with the intention of turning it into a glittering place of commercial success. When he employs childhood friend and ex-National Front member Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) they become lovers as well as working partners. However, complications soon ensue as the anger of Johnny's deserted gang begins to build and Omar is forced to face increasingly difficult family issues.
Beverly (Alison Steadman) has invited her new neighbours, Angela (Janine Duvitski) and Tony (John Salthouse), over for drinks. She has also asked her divorced neighbour, Sue (Harriet Reynolds), because Sue's fifteen year-old daughter, Abigail, was holding a party in their house. Beverly's husband, Lawrence (Tim Stern) comes home late from work, just before the guests arrive. The gathering starts off in a stiff insensitive British middle class way with people who do not know each other, until Beverly and Lawrence start sniping at each other.
In an electric, star-is-born performance, Mikey Madison soars as Anora, an enterprising, ferociously foulmouthed Brooklyn erotic dancer and sex worker whose Prince Not-So-Charming comes along in the form of a Russian oligarch's-child son. This is the beginning of a fractured fairy tale.
Marcel Ophuls' four-and-a-half hour portrait of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand under German occupation from 1940-44 is one of the greatest documentaries ever made, as important as Claude Lanzmann's 'Shoah' in its value not just as a film but as an essential historical record in its own right - not least since its interviewees are all long dead. Describing the fall of France and the rise of the Resistance, with the aid of newly-shot interviews and eye-opening archive footage including newsreels and propaganda films, Ophuls painstakingly crafts a complex, nuanced picture of what really happened in France over this period. He also demolishes numerous self-serving national myths to such an extent that, although he made the film for French television, they wouldn't show it for over a decade. But, as he demonstrates again and again, the overwhelming majority of French citizens during this period weren't heroes, villains or cowards, but simply ordinary people trying to make the best of an impossible situation. And it's Ophuls' portrayal of these people, their hopes, their fears and their appalling moral quandaries, that remains unmatched in film history.
"Amadeus" triumphs as gripping human drama, sumptuous period epic, glorious celebration of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It's 1781 and Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) is the competent court composer to Emperor Joseph II. When Mozart (Tom Hulce) arrives at court, Salieri is horrified to discover that the godlike musical gifts he desires for himself have been bestowed on a bawdy, impish jokester. Mad with envy, he plots to destroy Mozart by any means. Perhaps, even murder.
"Conclave" follows one of the world's most secretive and ancient events-selecting a new pope. The Church's most powerful leaders have gathered from around the world, locked together in the Vatican halls. Tasked with running this covert process, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) finds himself at the centre of a conspiracy and discovers a secret that could shake the very foundation of The Church. Also starring Stanley Tuccl, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini and directed by Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front).
One night in his near-empty tower block in contemporary London, Adam (Andrew Scott) has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), which punctures the rhythm of his everyday life. As a relationship develops between them, Adam is preoccupied with memories of the past and finds himself drawn back to the suburban town where he grew up, and the childhood home where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), appear to be living, just as they were on the day they died, 30 years before.
In the dying days of Edwardian England, English aristocrat Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch) finds himself marrying Sylvia (Rebecca Hall), a beautiful but cruel socialite who is pregnant with a child who may or may not be his. Christopher is determined to remain loyal to his wife, but his life is transformed the day he meets Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens), a fearless young suffragette. Moving from the glittering yet shallow world of London high society to the trench-scarred battlefields of France, feature is the story of one of the defining eras of the last century; a time when old certainties are being torn down and lives are changed forever.
In the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so called "green border" between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach the European Union are trapped in a geopolitical crisis cynically engineered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. In an attempt to provoke Europe, refugees are lured to the border by propaganda promising easy passage to the EU. Pawns in this hidden war, the lives of Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), a newly minted activist who has given up her comfortable life, Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), a young border guard, and a Syrian family intertwine. 30 years after 'Europa Europa', three-time Oscar Nominee Agnieszka Holland's poignant new feature 'Green Border' opens our eyes, speaks to the heart, and challenges us to reflect on the moral choices that fall to ordinary people every day.
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