ectonplasm's - Favourites List

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Romance! Adventure! Hilarity! Italy! Woody Allen leads this all-star cast on a rollicking ride through the streets of one of the world's greatest cities.

Lovers and fiancees, opera singers and architects, the talented and the famous, and the youthful and the wise are all players within this ensemble tour-de-force, as their stories and lives magically criss-cross and collide throughout this engaging film.

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From director Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider) and writer Gabriel Sherman (The Loudest Voice in the Room) comes the story of a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), eager to make his name as a hungry second son of a wealthy family in 1970s New York.

He comes under the spell of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the cutthroat attorney who would help create the Donald Trump we know today. Cohn sees in Trump the perfect protege: someone with raw ambition, a hunger for success, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to win.

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Set in Buenos Aires over the course of 24 hours, 'Nine Queens' is a taut, highly seductive heist thriller in which nothing is what it seems and where no one can be trusted.

A naive young con artist Juan (Gaston Pauls) teams up with an enigmatic, experienced master criminal Marcos (Ricardo Darin) for what could be the crime to end all crimes. But in a relationship propelled by brinkmanship and double-cross, corruption rarely has a happy ending.

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Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a young, black optometrist whose adoptive parents have recently died. Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) is a sad, unmarried mother who works in a factory and lives in a shabby terraced house with her confrontational daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook).

Cynthia's brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) is a successful wedding photographer who lives comfortably in suburbia with his snooty wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). In a misplaced effort to re-unite the family, Maurice and Monica throw a small barbecue party for Roxanne's 21st birthday. When Cynthia brings along her new friend Hortense, chaos ensues as some painful truths are revealed.

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Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is determined to avenge her father's blood by capturing Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man who shot and killed him for two pieces of gold. Just fourteen, she enlists the help of Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) a one-eyed, trigger-happy U.S.

Marshal with an affinity for drinking, and hardened Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) to track the fleeing Chaney. Despite their differences, their ruthless determination leads them on a perilous adventure that can only have one outcome: retribution.

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Sergeant Gerry Boyle is a small-town cop with a confrontational personality, a rebellious sense of humour, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in international cocaine smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett to his door.

However, when his enthusiastic new partner disappears, his favourite hooker attempts to blackmail him and the drug-traffickers themselves try to buy him off, sergeant Boyle finally realises that he needs to take matters into his own hands.

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From Mike Judge, one of the creative minds who brought you Beavis and Butt Head, King of the Hill and Office Space, comes an outrageous comedy that'll make you think twice about the future of mankind. Meet Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson). He's not the sharpest tool in the shed.

But when a government hibernation experiment goes awry, Bowers awakens in the year 2505 to find a society do dumbed-down by mass commercialism and mindless TV programming that he's become the smartest guy on the planet. Now it's up to an average Joe to get human evolution back on track! Filled with razor-sharp sarcasm and outrageous sight gags, Idiocracy will make you laugh out loud whether you're an absolute genius or a complete idiot!

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New York, 1961. Against the backdrop of a vibrant music scene and tumultuous cultural upheaval, an unknown 19-year-old named Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), from Minnesota, arrives in Greenwich Village with his guitar and revolutionary talent, destined to change the course of American music.

As he forms his most intimate relationships during his rise to fame, he grows restless with the folk movement, refusing to be defined, makes a controversial choice that culturally reverberates worldwide.

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Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield), England's Roman Catholic Chancellor, is forced into a difficult position when corrupt King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) demands his approval to divorce his wife and marry his mistress.

Torn between his conscience and duty to the crown, Sir Thomas chooses to say nothing, sparking the rage of the king. What unfolds is a battle of wills packed with palace intrigue, political brinkmanship and the fate of man, church and country. In the end, his silence spoke loudest of all.

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Lonely Depression-era waitress Cecilia (Mia Farrow) is hopelessly addicted to Hollywood movies. Spellbound by her new favorite, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Cecilia is astonished when the leading man (Jeff Daniels) suddenly walks off the screen to meet her.

Wooed by his charm, Cecilia finds herself falling for him - until she meets the real actor who plays him. Romanced by both a fictional character and a famous star, Cecilia struggles to locate the shifting line between fantasy and reality, only to discover that sometimes it's just a heartbeat away.

"Festival of Beauty" - Riefenstahl captures the grace of the athletes during field hockey, soccer, bicycling, equestrian, aquatics and gymnastic events. Highlights are the Pentathlon and the Decathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris; it ends with the triumphant conclusion of the games.

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Leni Riefenstahl is considered one of the most controversial women of the 20th century as an artist and a Nazi propagandist. Her films 'Triumph of the Will' and 'Olympia' stand for perfectly staged body worship and the celebration of the superior and victorious.

At the same time, these images project contempt for the imperfect and weak. Riefenstahl's aesthetics are more present than ever today - but is that also true for their implied message? The film examines this question using documents from Riefenstahl's estate, including private films, photos, recordings and letters. It uncovers fragments of her biography and places them in an extended historical context. How could Riefenstahl become the Reich's preeminent filmmaker and keep denying any closer ties to Hitler and Goebbels? During her long life after the fall of Nazism, she remained unapologetic, managing to control and shape her legacy. In personal documents, she mourns her "murdered ideals". 'Riefenstchl' represents many postwar Germans who, in letters and recorded telephone calls from her estate, dream of an organizing hand that will finally clean up the "shit-hole state". Then, her work would also experience a renaissance, in a generation or two this time could come - what if they are right? -

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Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), a dedicated sports and math teacher, starts her first job at a high school. She stands out among the new staff because of her idealism.

When a series of thefts occur at the school and one of her students is suspected, she decides to get to the bottom of the matter on her own. Carla tries to mediate between outraged parents, opinionated colleagues and aggressive students, but is relentlessly confronted with the structures of the school system. The more desperately she tries to do everything right, the more the young teacher threatens to break.