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List: Movie Bingo: Director's First Movie
12 Angry Men (Lumet)
A jury of white men is ready to pass judgment on a Puerto Rican teenager charged with murdering his father. However, one juror forces the others to consider whether the evidence--or the jurors' own prejudices--influences their deliberations. The story plays out in real time over ninety minutes in one sweltering room.
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[Pi] (Aronofsky)
A brilliant mathematician teeters on the brink of insanity as he searches for an elusive numerical code that will allow him to predict patterns in the stock market, while being pursued by an aggressive Wall Street firm set on financial domination and a Kaballah sect intent on unlocking the secrets behind their ancient holy texts.
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Away From Her (Polley)
Fiona and Grant are an Ontario couple who have been married for over 40 years. During the twilight of their years, Grant is forced to face the fact that Fiona's 'forgetfulness' actually is Alzheimer's. After Fiona wanders away and is found, the decision is made for her to go into a nursing home. For the first time in their relationship, they are forced to undergo a separation since this is the nursing home 'no-vistors,' first 30 days policy of a patient's stay. When Grant visits Fiona after the orientation period, he is devastated to find out that not only has she seemingly forgotten him, but she has transferred her affections to another man. As the distance between husband and wife grows, Grant must draw upon his love for Fiona to perform an act of self-sacrifice in order to ensure her happiness.
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Being John Malkovich (Jonze)
Craig Schwartz is a struggling street puppeteer; in order to make some money, Craig takes a job as a filing clerk. One day he accidentally discovers a door ... a portal into the brain of John Malkovich! For 15 minutes, he experiences the ultimate head trip-He is being John Malkovich! Then he's dumped onto the New Jersey turnpike! With his beautiful office mate Maxine and his pet-obsessed wife, they hatch a plan to let others into John's brain for just $200 a trip.
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Blood Simple (Coen Brothers)
"Joel and Ethan Coen's career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleazy bar owner releases a torrent of violence with one murderous thought ... Blood Simple reinvented the film noir for a new generation, marking the arrival of a filmmaking ensemble that would transform the American independent cinema scene"--Container.
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Bottle Rocket (Anderson)
"Three best friends try to escape their suburban boredom through a life of crime. But these bickering, bumbling thieves are no match for the local 'godfather,' who leads them into the biggest heist of their careers"--Container.
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Boyz n the Hood (Singleton)
Three friends struggle to survive in South Central Los Angeles where friendship, pain, danger and love form a true picture of life in the 'hood in this critically acclaimed, action-filled story.
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Breathless = À bout de souffle (Godard)
A small-time hood kills a policeman and tries to leave France, but his American girlfriend betrays him to the police and he gets killed trying to escape.
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Brick (Johnson)
Brendon Frye is a loner, someone who always knows all the angles but has chosen to stay on the outside. When the girl he loves turns up dead, he is determined to find the 'who' and 'why'.
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Citizen Kane (Welles)
The story of an immensely wealthy newspaper publisher, as he is remembered by his friends and former wife after his death. Loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. Frequently called the greatest film of all time.
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Columbus (Kogonada)
When a renowned architecture scholar falls suddenly ill during a speaking tour, his son Jin finds himself stranded in Columbus, Indiana; a small Midwestern city celebrated for its many modernist buildings. Jin strikes up a friendship with Casey, an architecture enthusiast who works at the local library. As their intimacy develops, they explore both the town and their conflicted emotions: Jin's estranged relationship with his father, and Casey's reluctance to leave Columbus and her mother.
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Cronos (Del Toro)
An antique dealer finds a 400 year old device that makes the user ever younger. The Cronos device is expensive and trouble occurs when a millionaire desires it.
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Duel (Spielberg)
A traveling businessman is menaced on the highway by a huge diesel truck. Although he can never see the psychopathic driver of the truck, he soon realizes that this guy is out to kill him!
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Eighth Grade (Burham)
Thirteen-year-old Kayla endures the tidal wave of contemporary suburban adolescence as she makes her way through the last week of middle school (the end of her thus far disastrous eighth grade year) before she begins high school.
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Emily the Criminal (Patton Ford)
Desperate for income, Emily takes a shady gig buying goods with stolen credit cards supplied by a charismatic middleman named Youcef. Seduced by the quick cash and illicit thrills, they hatch a plan to take their business to the next level.
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Eraserhead (Lynch)
A nightmarish collage of images which blends the grotesque and the absurd, the deeply disturbing and the darkly humorous. Henry is the nerdish central character who lives in a squalid apartment with a strange girl and their monstrous baby. The extraordinary special effects create an eerie, dream-like world with a logic all its own.
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Ex Machina (Garland)
Caleb, a coder at the world's largest Internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a retreat belonging to the company's reclusive CEO, Nathan. But when Caleb arrives he finds that he will have to participate in a fascinating experiment with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot woman, Ava. Truths, emotions, and motives are blurred as the relationship between Caleb, Ava, and Nathan intensifies.
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Fruitvale Station (Coogler)
Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old Bay Area resident, crosses paths with friends, enemies, family, and strangers on the last day of 2008. Based on a true story.
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Get Out (Peele)
A young black man meets his white girlfriend's parents at their estate, only to find out that the situation is much more sinister than it appears.
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Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (Chazelle)
A drama and musical about a man named Guy, who pursues and wins the heart of a lady named Madeline. When the excitement and sparks begin to fade between them, Guy suddenly turns to another woman who has caught his eye. However, things don't quite work out with his new flame and now he must decide either to win Madeline back or let her go forever.
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Half Nelson (Fleck)
A high school teacher with a drug habit finds a friendship in an unlikely source - one of his troubled students. Will their relationship help them or harm them?
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Hard Eight (P. T. Anderson)
Sydney, a poker-faced professional gambler plays guardian angel to unlucky John and his girlfriend. When John and his bride's honeymoon night leads to a disastrous hostage situation, the gambler takes care of it as usual. But when a slick casino pro threatens to reveal a secret from Sydney's past, Sydney decides to hedge his bets and not leave anything to chance.
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Hunger (McQueen)
In Northern Ireland's Maze prison in 1981, 27-year-old Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike to protest the British government's refusal to recognize him and his fellow IRA inmates as political prisoners. A transcedent depiction of what a human being is willing to endure in order to be heard.
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In Bruges (McDonagh)
Hit men Ray and Ken have been ordered to cool their heels in the storybook city of Bruges (it's in Belgium) after finishing a big job. But since hit men make the worst tourists, they soon find themselves in a life-and-death struggle of comic proportions against one very angry crime boss.
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Kicking and Screaming (Baumbach)
A group of college students afraid of the future remain on campus to await their futures, while trying to answer the question where do we go from here? Includes deleted scenes, interviews, never-before-released short film, and more.
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Killer of Sheep (Burnett)
Includes Killer of Sheep (a masterpiece of African American filmmaking and one of the finest debuts in history) and My Brother's Wedding (a young man working at his parents' store tries to find himself). Bonus features are included.
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Lady Bird (Gerwig)
The adventures of a young woman living in Northern California for a year.
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Little Woods (DaCosta)
Ollie is barely getting by in an economically depressed fracking boomtown in North Dakota. She has left her days of illegally running prescription pills over the Canadian border behind, eyeing a potential new job that would finally break her out of the small town. But when her mother dies, she is reunited with her estranged sister Deb, who faces a mounting crisis: the combined effect of an unplanned pregnancy and a deadbeat ex.
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Medicine for Melancholy (Jenkins)
Two African American twenty-somethings have a one-night stand. And a night they barely remember becomes a day they will never forget. A tale of sex, race, bicycles and modern urban life. Deals with the challenge of being a minority in a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco.
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Metropolitan (Stillman)
When a group of young sophisticated high society friends in New York take in a new member with more humble origins, they begin to learn what life is like outside their sheltered world.
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Nightcrawler (Gilroy)
A pulse-pounding thriller set in the nocturnal underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Lou Bloom, a driven young man desperate for work who discovers the high-speed world of L.A. crime journalism. Finding a group of freelance camera crews who film crashes, fires, murder and other mayhem, Lou muscles into the cut-throat, dangerous realm of nightcrawling, where each police siren wail equals a possible windfall and victims are converted into dollars and cents.
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Pariah (Rees)
Alike is a 17-year-old African-American woman who lives with her parents and younger sister in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. She has a flair for poetry, and is a good student at her local high school. Alike is quietly but firmly embracing her identity as a lesbian. Wondering how much she can confide in her family, Alike strives to get through adolescence with grace, humor, and tenacity--sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, but always moving forward.
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Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (Burton)
Pee-Wee sets out to find his stolen special bike, and encounters bikers, bums, con men and cowboys in his search.
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Pig (Sarnoski)
A truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregonian wilderness must return to his past in Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped.
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Promising Young Woman (Fennell)
Everyone said Cassie was a promising young woman, until a mysterious event abruptly derailed her future. But nothing in Cassie's life is what it appears to be. She's wickedly smart, tantalizingly cunning, and she's living with a secret double life by night. Now, an unexpected encounter is about to give Cassie a chance to right the wrongs of the past in this thrilling and wildly entertaining story.
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Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino)
After a botched bank robbery, the gang meets up in a warehouse, only to suspect that one of them is really a cop.
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Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Soderbergh)
Focuses on the complexities of human intimacy and deception in the modern age. Housewife Ann (Andie MacDowell) feels distant from her lawyer husband, John (Peter Gallagher), who is sleeping with her sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). When John's old friend Graham (James Spader) comes to town, Ann is drawn to the soft-spoken outsider, eventually uncovering his startling private obsession: videotaping women as they confess their deepest desires. A piercingly intelligent chamber piece, in which the video camera becomes a charged metaphor for the characters' isolation.
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Shallow Grave (Boyle)
When three friends find their new roommate dead and a suitcase full of money under his bed, they have no trouble deciding how to dispose of the cash, but the body is a different story. Their troubles are compounded when they meet the men who come to retrieve the money.
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Shaun of the Dead (Wright)
No-hoper Shaun spends his life in his local, The Winchester, argues with his Mum and neglects his girlfriend Liz. When Liz dumps him, Shaun finally decides to get a grip. He must shape up and win her back. Unfortunately, the dead are returning to life and eating the living. Facing a Zombie epidemic armed with a cricket bat, Shaun sets out to rescue his mum, girlfriend, and - grudgingly, his step-dad and Liz's friends, and take them to the safest place he knows, The Winchester.
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She's Gotta Have It (Lee)
When it comes to love, Nola Darling has gotta problem: she's just gotta have "it." And she's having a hard time deciding who'll give "it" the best. Choosing between a romantic-but-possessive nice guy, a flashy-but-vain fashion model and a fast-riding but faster-talking bicyclist, Nola finds that lessons in love can be enlightening, heart-rending, but mostly, exasperating!
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Slacker (Linklater)
Richard Linklater's Slacker presents a day in the life of a subculture of marginal, eccentric, and overeducated citizens in and around the University of Texas; a prescient look at an emerging generation of aggressive nonparticipants.
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Sweetie (Campion)
Jane Campion, director of The Piano, will always be remembered for this stunning debut feature. The focus of this film is the hazardous relationship between button-down, superstitious Kay, and her rampaging sister, 'Sweetie.'
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Swiss Army Man (Kwan and Scheinert, the Daniels)
Hank is stranded on a deserted island, having given up all hope of ever making it home again. One day everything changes when a corpse names Manny washes up onshore. The two become fast friends, and ultimately go on an epic adventure that will bring Hank back to the woman of his dreams.
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Synecdoche, New York (Kaufman)
Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. Determined to create a piece of brutal realism and honesty, he gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in Manhattan's theater district. He instructs each to live out their constructed lives in a small mockup of the city outside. As the city inside the warehouse grows, Caden's own life veers wildly off track. His daughter, Olive, is growing up under questionable guidance. He's helplessly driving his marriage to actress Claire into the ground. His daughter, Ariel, is mentally handicapped. He steadily blurs the line between the world of the play and that of his own deteriorating reality. As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both personally and professionally, a change in creative direction arrives in Millicent Weems, a celebrated theater actress who may offer Caden the break he needs.
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Sólo Con Tu Pareja ( Cuarón)
Don Juan-ish yuppie Tomás Tomás spends his nights juggling so many beautiful women that he can't keep their names straight. That is until one spurned nurse gives him a taste of his own medicine.
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The 400 Blows = Les quatre cents coups (Truffaut)
Fourteen-year-old Antoine Doinet lives in a cramped apartment with his mother and stepfather, neglected by them and unlucky at school. Living an intense imaginative life of his own he gets into trouble and is finally committed to reform school from which he escapes and runs towards the sea, which he has never seen.
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The Duellists (Scott)
Two officers in Napoleon's army violently confront each other in a series of savage duels.
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The Kid (Chaplin)
The Tramp and his ragamuffin sidekick triumph over life's hard knocks in the landmark film that changed the notion of what a screen comedy could be.
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The Maltese Falcon (Huston)
Detective Sam Spade goes in search of a priceless statuette after the death of his partner.
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The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, S.)
A group of male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents in suburban Detroit in the mid 1970s.
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The Witch (Eggers)
A family in 1630s New England faces destruction by the forces of witchcraft, black magic, and possession. When one of their five children goes missing and their life-sustaining crops fail, they fall victim to paranoia and fear as they begin to turn on one another.
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Thief (Mann)
Frank is a professional safecracker. He wants to quit to start a new life, but the mobsters disagree.
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Walking and Talking (Holofcener)
Comedy about four friends looking for love in the '90's.
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