All Recommendations
Country of the Deaf
Strana Glukhikh is about an unusual relationship between two women, one of them a deaf-mute dancer and the other on the run from the mafia. Yaya, the deaf girl, offers to hide Rita whose boyfriend, Alyosha owes gambling debts to the mafia, but in return she wants her to leave the young man and run off with her to an imaginary paradise where material values do not exist.
Life is Beautiful
Erasmus compiled a few thousand Adagia, each exemplifies the classical truths that are our timeless and everyday wisdom. Life is Beautiful shows us just how wondrous life really is, by reflecting, quietly manipulating and exposing every day moments and scenes in 30 short stories.
Chasuke's Journey
Things are hectic in heaven. Dozens of scribes sit before a long scroll incessantly scribbling away. They are composing the biographies of earth-dwellers. What is invented by the men in heaven is lived out below. And their employer, God, is increasingly vehement in demanding avant-garde ideas. Take, for example, the beautiful Yuri, a girl who dies in a car crash. Some of the heavenly scribes find this very dull and send former gangster Chas, who has become a heavenly tea-boy, back down to earth with instructions to save Yuri no matter what. And so Chas ends up in Okinawa, gets to know the earth-dwellers, interferes in their fates, becomes celebrated as 'Mr Angel' and is hounded by brutal enemies. His falling in love with Yuri is of course a foregone conclusion. But no one could anticipate what happens next. Not even God himself
Monkey Business
Research chemist Barnaby Fulton works on a fountain of youth pill for a chemical company. One of the labs chimps gets loose in the laboratory and mixes chemicals, but then pours the mix into the water cooler. When trying one of his own samples, washed down with water from the cooler, Fulton begins to act just like a twenty-year-old and believes his potion is working. Soon his wife and boss are also behaving like children.
Cries and Whispers
As Agnes slowly dies of cancer, her sisters are so immersed in their own psychic pains that they are unable to offer her the support she needs.
Mirror
A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.
The Man Without a Past
Arriving in Helsinki, a nameless man is beaten within an inch of his life by thugs, miraculously recovering only to find that he has completely lost his memory. Back on the streets, he attempts to begin again from zero, befriending a moody dog and becoming besotted with a Salvation Army volunteer.
The Isle
Mute Hee-Jin is working as a clerk in a fishing resort in the Korean wilderness; selling baits, food and occasionally her body to the fishing tourists. One day she falls in love with Hyun-Shik, who is on the run from the police, and rescues him with a fish hook when he tries to commit suicide.
The Phantom of Liberty
This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.
Love and Death
In czarist Russia, a neurotic soldier and his distant cousin formulate a plot to assassinate Napoleon.
Dreams
Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.
Last Tango in Paris
A recently widowed American begins an anonymous sexual relationship with a young Parisian woman.
Back to School
Self-made millionaire Thornton Melon decides to get a better education and enrolls at his son Jason's college. While Jason tries to fit in with his fellow students, Thornton struggles to gain his son's respect, giving way to hilarious antics.
Poetry
A South Korean woman in her sixties enrolls in a poetry class as she grapples with her faltering memory and her grandson's appalling wrongdoing.
Au Revoir les Enfants
Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.
Apur Sansar
Apu, now a jobless ex-student dreaming vaguely of a future as a writer, is invited to join an old college friend on a trip up-country to a village wedding.
Days of Heaven
In 1916, a Chicago steel worker accidentally kills his supervisor and flees to the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend and little sister to work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer.
The Merchant of Venice
Venice, 1596. Bassanio begs his friend Antonio, a prosperous merchant, to lend him a large sum of money so that he can woo Portia, a very wealthy heiress; but Antonio has invested his fortune abroad, so they turn to Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, and ask him for a loan.
The Beguiled
Offbeat Civil War drama in which a wounded Yankee soldier, after finding refuge in an isolated girls' school in the South towards the end of the war, becomes the object of the young women's sexual fantasies. The soldier manipulates the situation for his own gratification, but when he refuses to completely comply with the girls' wishes, they make it very difficult for him to leave.
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
An advertising executive dreams of getting out of the city and building a perfect home in the country, only to find the transition fraught with problems.