Tag Archives: 2000s

Edgy, absorbing and carnal, BEAUTIFUL SOMETHING takes a fresh and unsentimental look at the links between young and old, black and white, sex and love, desire and art. Cute, twenty-two-year-old writer Brian continually crashes and burns with each guy he meets, but does not understand why. The stunningly gorgeous Jim is not afraid to break hearts except when it comes to his forty-something lover and world-renown metal sculptor Drew, who can’t seem to look past his latest masterpiece. Lastly there’s Bob, a successful talent agent from LA in his mid-sixties who leads a double life being a sugar daddy to the young men he picks up. While all four comb the streets looking for connection, they oftentimes settle for something quick and dirty except that tonight is much different. Each guy he meets, but does not understand why. The stunningly gorgeous Jim is not afraid to break hearts except when it comes to his forty-something lover and world-renown metal sculptor Drew, who can’t seem to look…
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En vísperas de un día especial, los lazos familiares se muestran frágiles ante el sentimiento compartido de una gran ausencia. El tío Manuel, un hombre muy especial, está dedicado a sacar adelante a sus sobrinos adolescentes y ayudar a su cuñado, sindicalista y desempleado. La casa de mamá será el corazón de esta noche en la que la familia podría desvanecerse en un mundo de sueños perdidos. Ópera prima sobre la desintegración de la institución familiar.
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Prepare yourself to be either infuriated or fascinated by this French film. There’s no in-between reaction available here.When people talk about seeing a really weird film where nothing happened and the end didn’t make any sense, this is the film they’re probably talking about. I’d call it fascinating, but I’m well aware that I’m probably in the minority.
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Year 1952. Bill Rowan is 18, dreaming his life away at the family’s riverside home, waiting to be called up for two years conscription in the Army. He swims each morning and yearns for a pretty girl who cycles past at that time on the tow path across the river. This idyll is shattered by the harsh realities of boot camp. He meets Percy, an amoral prankster, and together they plot the downfall of Sergeant Yeomans, their rigid tormentor. Percy and Bill are rivals and antagonists, but gradually forge a deep friendship. After basic training many conscripts are shipped out to fight the Chinese in the Korean War, but Bill and Percy are assigned to the claustrophobia of a closed, prison-like training camp where they act as instructors.
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In her teenage years, Qian Yiehong (Yan Bingyan) rejected a boy out of political differences. He hit her back with a brick, and since then her back has hurt whenever it rains. Some time later, she falls in love with a married man, but he betrays her in the end, leaving her with the pain of abortion. Qian finally gets married to a man whom she does not love. But when she divorces him, he brutally extract his tooth to give as a souvenir to her…
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Helena Trestikova is the author of 10 episodes from the series Women on the Brink of the New Millennium, intimate portraits of both successful women and women on the social periphery. The tragic story of a girl named Katka who believes that joy and happiness can be applied through a hypodermic needle. All she is left with is despair. We first meet Katka at a rehab clinic in Nemcice, still full of optimism and faith in a drug-free future. The film tries to draw attention to the drug problem from a somewhat different point of view.
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Bill and Turner Ross’s Tchoupitoulas begins with wistful narration from its young protagonist, an impoverished African-American boy with a distinctly Southern drawl detailing a dream he’s recently had: “I don’t really have dreams,” he says, “but last night I did. It was actually a close-up of my future—like a flashback, except a flashing future. I was dreaming I seen me in the NFL, and I was playing for the New York Giants.” Right away, the similarities between this doc-fiction hybrid and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild are evident, which makes sense considering both films are products of Court 13, a so-called “independent filmmaking army” made up of a group of ex-New Yorkers who moved to New Orleans in hopes of fostering a grassroots film community. But thanks to its decidedly less sensationalistic point of view, Tchoupitoulas proves the perfect antidote to the twee affectations of Zeitlin’s feature.
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A day in the lives of a group of average teenage high school students. The film follows every character and shows their daily routines. However two of the students plan to do something that the student body won’t forget.
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J.KESSELS is both a hilarious road movie and a bittersweet trip down memory lane, a crazy ride in a flame-adorned Plymouth Gold Duster from provincial Holland to Hamburg’s Reeperbahn and back. And a hallucinatory trip through the mind of an author, who no longer knows if his novel is a product of his own imagination, or if he is actually living it. The lead character is Kessels, a chain smoking tough guy with a heart of gold. Kessels and Frans are ageing youngsters who like nothing better than to consume nicotine, beer and country & western music. However, in Frans’ novels Kessels and he are fearless crime fighters: heroes even, but the world around them is unaware of it. Heroes who create a flurry of misunderstanding at every step. Frans accepts the assignment for Kessels and him to kidnap a philandering criminal in Hamburg and return him to his wife, because the caller is the younger brother of BB, or Brigitte, once the focus of little Frans’ prepubescent sexual dreams and awakening…
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Determined to no longer work for anyone else, Jérôme tries to set up his own company, no matter the cost and despite his wife’s reluctance. Ugo, their 11-year-old son, plays tennis and wants to become a champion. To do so, he must get into the French national tennis training school at Roland Garros.
Like his father, Ugo is ready to do anything to achieve his aims. Together, Ugo and Jérôme come to learn that you can’t bend the rules in order to succeed.
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