All Recommendations
Before the Rain
The circularity of violence seen in a story that circles on itself. In Macedonia, during the war in Bosnia, Christians hunt an ethnic Albanian girl who may have murdered one of their own. A young monk who's taken a vow of silence offers her protection. In London, a photographic editor who's pregnant needs to talk it out with her estranged husband and chooses a toney restaurant.
The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
The arranged marriage between a capricious woman from Tokyo high society and a quiet and rustic man is tested by a marital crisis.
Maborosi
A tragedy strikes a young woman's life without warning or reason. She continues living while searching for meaning in a lonely world.
Late Autumn
A woman and her daughter are each forced to contend with an increasing pressure to marry, particularly from three men who knew her late husband.
The Women
A happily married woman lets her catty friends talk her into divorce when her husband strays.
Three Monkeys
A family battles against the odds to stay together when small lies grow into an extravagant cover-up. In order to avoid hardship and responsibilities that would otherwise be impossible to endure, the family chooses to ignore the truth, not to see, hear or talk about it. But does playing “Three Monkeys” invalidate the truth of its existence?
Berberian Sound Studio
In the 1970s, a British sound technician is brought to Italy to work on the sound effects for a gruesome horror film. His nightmarish task slowly takes over his psyche, driving him to confront his own past.
What Did the Lady Forget?
A professor, Komiya, and his bossy wife, Tokio, are to look after Setsuko, their high-spirited niece from Osaka. Despite being a minor, Setsuko is a liberated woman who does whatever she wants, including smoking. She even convinces Koyima to take her to a geisha house. When she gets rather tipsy, the professor calls Okada, one of his students, to take her home. The wife becomes suspicious of Setsuko when she sees Okada bringing her home.
The Astronauts
An inventor builds a homemade spacecraft, and uses it to have various adventures, including peeping at women, visiting ‘human’ planets, and becoming involved in intergalactic warfare.
There Was a Father
Shuhei Horikawa, a poor schoolteacher, struggles to raise his son Ryohei by himself, despite neither money nor prospects.
Jesus Henry Christ
At the age of ten, Henry James Hermin, a boy who was conceived in a petri-dish and raised by his feminist mother, follows a string of Post-It notes in hopes of finding his biological father.
Go, Go Second Time Virgin
Go, Go, Second Time Virgin is the story of two damned and abused teenagers who meet and fall in mutant love on a Tokyo rooftop. Their only hope is to cement their love with an escape into oblivion.
Hideout
Ukraine, 1946. Orest, commander of an insurgent squad, is in a hideout together with his pregnant wife Eva and several fighters. The NKVD surrounds the insurgents. The captain of the commissariat squad gives Orest a choice: he either gives Eva out or accepts an unequal fight.
Onibaba
While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can't steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.
Mississippi Burning
Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small town ways of his partner, a former sheriff.
Letters from Iwo Jima
The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it.
Youth
Two lifelong friends bond whilst vacationing in a luxury Swiss Alps lodge as they ponder retirement. While Fred has no plans to resume his musical career despite the urging of his loving daughter Lena, Mick is intent on finishing the screenplay for what may be his last important film for his muse Brenda. And where will inspiration lead their younger friend Jimmy, an actor grasping to make sense of his next performance?
Seven Samurai
A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Harry Potter has lived under the stairs at his aunt and uncle's house his whole life. But on his 11th birthday, he learns he's a powerful wizard—with a place waiting for him at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. As he learns to harness his newfound powers with the help of the school's kindly headmaster, Harry uncovers the truth about his parents' deaths—and about the villain who's to blame.