Foreign - Movies

The Ceremony

Foreign

The most famous dominatrix in France creates sadomasochist “Ceremonies” in her chateau. Catherine Robbe-Grillet, age 84, defies the relations between power and submission, sensuality and physical pain. She surrounds herself with brilliant characters, depicting complex lives on the other side of social conventional boundaries. Catherine writes sadomasochistic novels under pseudonym Jeanne De Berg.

Playground

Foreign

Final 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.

The Empty Hours

Foreign

On the desolated coast of Veracruz, 17 year-old Sebastián takes over running his uncle’s small and cozy rent-by-the hour motel. There he meets Miranda, a regular customer who comes to the motel to meet a lover who always keeps her waiting. As Sebastián and Miranda get to know each other, an ambiguous game of seduction begins between them.

Angels Wear White

Foreign

In a small seaside town, two schoolgirls are assaulted by a middle-aged man in a motel. Mia, a teenager who was working on reception that night, is the only witness. For fear of losing her job, she says nothing. Meanwhile, 12-year-old Wen, one of the victims, finds that her troubles have only just begun. Trapped in a world that offers them no safety, Mia and Wen will have to find their own way out.

Floating Weeds

Foreign

One 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.

Fasten Your Seatbelt (Allacciate le cinture)

Foreign

Elena and Antonio are not made for one another. Their personalities and life choices are too different. They see the world differently, they relate differently to others, they think and live differently. They’re polar opposites. What's more they're both very much taken. Yet despite all this they are swept away by a mutual attraction they struggle to fight. This gorgeous Italian drama follows Elena as she balances the demands and rewards of intimacy vs responsibility over thirteen years of passion, friendship, and heartache.

Cairo Station

Foreign

Youssef Chahine established his international reputation with this masterpiece, which, though initially a commercial failure in Egypt, would become one of the most influential and celebrated works in all of Arab cinema. The director himself stars as Kenawi, a disabled newspaper hawker whose obsession with a sultry drink seller (Hind Rostom, known as the "Marilyn Monroe of Arabia") leads to tragedy of operatic proportions on the streets of Cairo. Blending elements of neorealism with provocative noir-melodrama, CAIRO STATION is a work of raw populist poetry that explores the individual’s search for a place in Egypt’s new postrevolutionary political order.

The Slingshot

Foreign

Based on the autobiographical novel by Roland Schutt, "The Slingshot" is an endearing coming-of-age drama. Set in 1920s Stockholm, a 12-year-old boy endures the hardships of an unhappy family life by shutting himself away with his inventions . . . one of which is a super slingshot.

The Wasted Times

Foreign

Set against a chaotic, war torn Shanghai, “The Wasted Times” follows a local crime boss at the receiving end of the Japanese army’s attempt to forge a dubious alliance. Spanning three separate times during the period, the story details mindsets from various perspectives, all culminating in a suspenseful and tense finale.

L'immensità

Foreign

Clara (Penélope Cruz) and her emotionally distant husband Felice (Vincenzo Amato) relocate to Rome to raise a family. Even though the paint is fresh, and the appliances are new, the crushing expectations around marriage, desire, and gender in the early 1970s remain as traditional as ever. Their children Andrew (played by newcomer Luana Giuliani), Gino, and Diana are likewise poised at a precipice, on the verge of adolescence, with nothing but their imaginations to defuse family tensions. The eldest child, Andrew (nicknamed Adri by his parents), yearns for another life – an outsized, vibrantly-realized vision of a world where he gets to live as the boy he knows himself to be. Without an accepted vocabulary for talking about his transgender identity, Andrew tells adults that he’s an alien from another galaxy and makes a habit of running away to pursue a local Roma girl who accepts his boyhood at face value. As an outsider ostracized for her own eccentricities, Clara instinctively strives to protect her son despite not fully understanding him. An effortlessly moving film about growing up, fitting in, and breaking the mold, L’immensita is as freewheeling and creative as its central characters, mixing genres and staging musical numbers out of thin air.

Antoine and Colette

Foreign

This 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?

L'argent

Foreign

In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency. Transposing a Tolstoy novella to contemporary Paris, L’argent follows a counterfeit bill as it originates as a prop in a schoolboy prank, then circulates like a virus among the corrupt and the virtuous alike before landing with a young truck driver and leading him to incarceration and violence. With brutal economy, Bresson constructs his unforgiving vision of original sin out of starkly perceived details, rooting his characters in a dehumanizing material world that withholds any hope of transcendence.

Caught by the Tides

Foreign

The 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 change: of people, landscapes, cities, politics, ideas.

Hotel Paradise (2012)

Foreign

In Hotel Paradise, a haven of solidarity for all the abandoned, two lives meet: Paul, 50, at the end of the line, who only sees his children every other weekend, and Marie, 35, who returns 15 years later carrying a secret.

Fögi is a Bastard

Foreign

Set in Zurich during the early seventies and boasting a killer soundtrack that includes the likes of punk legends The Stooges and The Velvet Underground, 'Fögi is a Bastard' is director Marcel Gisler’s honest depiction of teenage infatuation and obsession. Beni is a 15-year old sensitive romantic completely besotted by the super sexy Fögi, the front man to local punk outfit The Minks. The wide-eyed seemingly innocent Beni - who begins his courting of Fögi with lovingly penned letters - is welcomed into the out gay punk musician's world of partying and playing gigs. However, as Fögi slowly drifts from an ambitious music career to the addictive world of drugs, a wedge slowly forms in their relationship which leads to Beni becoming a submissive 'dog' in their relationship and also leads to Beni supporting his lover with sex work. With its raw depiction of urban life, ghettoized youth, working class angst, and gay male sex without any compromise, 'Fögi is a Bastard' is a must see for fans of coming-of-age cinema and alternative queer teen sensibilities and aesthetics.

Amazon Jail

Foreign

Deep in the Amazon jungle, a group of nubile naifs are trapped in a primitive prison by whip-cracking white slavers who aren't above sampling the merchandise themselves. But these hothouse flowers aren't about to be plucked, and the girls go native - only to fall into the hands of a perverted priest whose followers just love a woman in war paint! Caught between brutal bounty hunters and the holy man's horny henchmen, it's a battle of wits, weapons, and feminine wiles as the desperate damsels trade it all to escape this poison paradise alive!

Black God, White Devil

Foreign

Myth, mysticism, and revolution collide in a blistering existential western from Glauber Rocha, a pioneer of Brazil’s socially committed Cinema Novo movement. After killing his swindling boss, ranch hand Manoel (Geraldo Del Rey) goes on the run with his wife, Rosa (Yoná Magalhães). In the stark hinterlands, they join forces with armed bandits and pledge allegiance to a self-styled holy man who preaches revolt against rich landowners while perpetrating unspeakable acts of violence against the innocent. Suffused with antiauthoritarian fervor and the intensity of life in the desert, this landmark work of radical cinema is a scorched-earth allegory about mindless fanaticism and the allure of dead-end ideologies.

The People vs. Fritz Bauer

Foreign

Germany, 1957. Attorney General Fritz Bauer receives crucial evidence on the whereabouts of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann. The lieutenant colonel, responsible for the mass deportation of the Jews, is allegedly hiding in Buenos Aires. Bauer, himself Jewish, has been trying to take crimes from the Third Reich to court ever since his return from Danish exile. However, there is little success so far due to the fierce German determination to repress its sinister past. Due to his distrust in the German justice system, Fritz Bauer contacts the Israeli secret service Mossad, and by doing so, commits treason. Bauer is not seeking revenge for the Holocaust - he is concerned with the German future.

Bare Behind Bars

Foreign

In a women's penitentiary where brutal beatings, steamy showers, and full cavity searches are the order of the day, the cons are turning into pros - and the cemetery is running out of room! To stay out of the torture chamber, the inmates can barter their bodies in the wicked warden's white slave trade, or submit to the nympho nurse's peculiar brand of medical malpractice. But when these lawless lovelies go on the lam to wreak vengeance on straight society, no one will be safe!

A Man Called Ove

Foreign

Stepping 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.

Foreign Movies