Lists and Suggestions

"Marina and Orlando are in love and planning their future, when one night Orlando suddenly falls ill and passes away. Instead of being able to mourn her lover, Marina is treated with suspicion by authorities and with disdain by his family. She is forbidden to attend his funeral and thrown out of the apartment they shared. Marina is a trans woman and for most of Orlando's family, her sexual identity is a perversion. So she must battle the very same forces that she as spent a lifetime fighting just to become the woman she is now -- complex, strong, forthright and fantastic."--Container.

It tells the gripping story of a young German soldier on the Western Front of World War I. Paul and his comrades experience first-hand how the initial euphoria of war turns into desperation and fear as they fight for their lives, and each other, in the trenches. The film from director Edward Berger is based on the world-renowned bestseller of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque.

A South Korean man bumps into a former, but forgotten childhood classmate one day and he hits it off with the young woman. An immediate romantic tryst follows, but the young woman plans to leave for Africa in a few days. She asks her rediscovered friend to feed her cat while she is away. He does so and is eager for his new romantic interest to return. The situation quickly becomes complicated, however, when she returns from Africa with a mystery man who seems to be a dangerous trouble maker. Then when the young woman disappears, a disturbing situation unfolds.

A filmmaker returns to his Sicilian hometown for the first time in thirty years and looks back on his life. As a young boy he was befriended by the projectionist at the movie theater, the Cinema Paradiso. As he grew up, he learned to love films, and was encouraged by his good friend to pursue his dream of one day making movies.

A broken marriage leads to a bitter custody battle with an embattled son at the center, a domestic thriller that will keep audiences guessing and leave them with their hearts in their throats. Miriam and Antoine Besson have divorced, and Miriam is seeking sole custody of their son Julien to protect him from a father she claims is violent. Antoine pleads his case as a scorned dad whose son has been turned against him by his vindictive mother.

Takes you into Hitler's bunker, in 1945, during the brutal and harrowing last days of the Third Reich. Seen through the eyes of Hitler's infamous secretary Traudl Junge, optimism crumbles into grim realization and terror as it becomes clear that Germany's defeat is inevitable. As the Russian army circles the city, the dimly lit halls of the underground refuge become an execution chamber for the Fuhrer and his closest advisors.

"Legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski created one of his freest and most visually inventive films yet with this story of a gray donkey named EO. After being removed from an itinerant circus, EO begins a trek across the countryside, experiencing cruelty and kindness from a cast of characters including an Italian countess and a Polish soccer team. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, and featuring stunning cinematography by Michal Dymek coupled with Pawel Mykietyn's resonant score, EO presents the follies and triumphs of humankind from the perspective of its four-legged protagonist on a quest for freedom."--Container.

"Hatidze lives with her ailing mother in the mountains of Macedonia, making a living cultivating honey using ancient beekeeping traditions. When an unruly family moves in next door, what at first seems like a balm for her solitude becomes a source of tension as they, too, want to practice beekeeping, while disregarding her advice"--Container.

Multidisciplinary artists Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman bring their unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision. It is a sci-fi-punk-musical that's a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that they have been exploring in their work, including on Williams' 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. It takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources, and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry.

One of the world's great cinema artists, Jafar Panahi has been carefully crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, despite being banned from filmmaking by the Iranian government since 2010. In No Bears completed shortly before his imprisonment in 2022, Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, a dissident filmmaker who relocates to a rural border town to direct a film remotely in nearby Turkey and finds himself embroiled in a local scandal. As he struggles to complete his feature, Panahi must confront the opposing pulls of tradition and progress, city and country, belief and evidence, as well as the universal desire to reject oppression.

A billionaire decides on a whim to create a movie, hiring a team he considers the best: a renowned filmmaker and two egotistical actors -- one from Hollywood and the other from experimental theatre -- who cannot get along. While the director creates bizarre rituals to test their abilities, the actors find themselves confronting each other as well as their pasts and their bodies of work.

Impoverished priest Harihar Ray (Kanu Banerjee), dreaming of a better life for himself and his family, leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work. Alone, his wife, Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), looks after her rebellious daughter, Durga (Uma Das Gupta), and her young son, Apu (Subir Banerjee), as well as Harihar's elderly aunt Indir (Chunibala Devi). The children enjoy the small pleasures of their difficult life, while their parents suffer the daily indignities heaped upon them.

Céline Sciamma's follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire transcends time and space to weave a delicately emotional fable about grief, family, and connection across generations. In the wake of her grandmother's death, eight-year-old Nelly accompanies her distraught mother to her childhood home. There, Nelly's encounter with another young girl brings mother and daughter together in a way neither could have ever imagined. Evoking childhood's perpetual state of wonder through luminous, richly textured images, Petite Maman takes viewers on a journey inward for a quietly miraculous tale of emotional time travel.

France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Héloïse first moments of freedom. Héloïse portrait soon becomes a collaborative act of and a testament to their love.

With his eighth and most personal film, Alfonso Cuaron recreated the early 1970s Mexico City of his childhood, narrating a tumultuous period in the life of a middle-class family through the experiences of Cleo, the indigenous domestic worker who keeps the household running. Charged with the care of four small children abandoned by their father, Cleo tends to the family even as her own life is shaken by personal and political upheavals.

In this film, India's best-known "curry" western, two adventurous crooks are hired by ex-cop, Thakur, to hunt down the dreaded dacoit Gabbar Singh who massacred Thakur's family. A technically accomplished film, it uses spectacular cinematography, popular music and dialogues that became famous throughout the country.

"On the margins of Tokyo, a dysfunctional band of outsiders are united by fierce loyalty, a penchant for petty theft, and playful grifting. When the young son is arrested, secrets are exposed that upend their tenuous, below-the-radar existence and test their quietly radical belief that it is love--not blood--that defines a family."--Container.

October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child's body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner's Kaddish.

In one of the last traditional tribes in the South Pacific, a young girl falls in love with her chief 's grandson. But when war with their enemies escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal. The young lovers run away, but are pursued by warriors of both tribes. With their lives on the line, the star-crossed lovers must choose between their hearts and the peaceful future of the tribe.

Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) fall in love at first sight. She has her own tattoo shop and he plays the banjo in a bluegrass band. They bond over their shared enthusiasm for American music and culture, and dive headfirst into a sweeping romance that plays out on and off stage- but when an unexpected tragedy hits their new family, everything they know and love is tested. An intensely moving portrait of a relationship from beginning to end, propelled by a soundtrack of foot-stomping bluegrass, The Broken Circle Breakdown is a romantic drama of the highest order.

Lucas is a former school teacher who has been forced to start over having overcome a tough divorce and the loss of his job. Just as things are starting to go his way, his life is shattered when an untruthful remark throws his small community into a collective state of hysteria. As the lie spreads, Lucas is forced to fight a lonely fight for his life and dignity.

An irreverent, uplifting comedy about friendship, trust, and human possibility. Based on a true story of friendship between a handicapped millionaire and his street-smart ex-con caretaker, The Intouchables depicts an unlikely camaraderie rooted in honesty and humor between two individuals who, on the surface, would seem to have nothing in common.

As a group of teens go out for a night on the town, a sophomore known only as 'The Girl with Black Hair' experiences a series of surreal encounters with the local nightlife, all the while unaware of the romantic longings of Senpai, a fellow student who has been creating increasingly fantastic and contrived reasons to run into her, in an effort to win her heart.

From two-time Palme d'Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne comes the story of seventeen-year-old Lokita and twelve-year-old Tori, two immigrants to Belgium from Cameroon and Benin, respectively whose siblinglike bond is the only resource they can depend on in their struggle for survival on the margins of European society. The pair work as performers in a cheap trattoria, dealing drugs on the side, while balancing the demands of an indifferent bureaucracy. When Lokita is held captive in a marijuana grow house, events spiral out of control. Winner of the Seventh-Fifth Anniversary Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, the latest humanist drama from the Dardenne brothers is a heart-stopping thriller that casts an unflinching eye on the trials of the young and dispossessed.

During WWII, nurse Eliška is part of a secret resistance movement with her lover, surgeon Richard. When he is discovered, she is forced to leave the hospital in order to hide from the Nazis as well. A sympathetic colleague sends her off with a patient whose life she saved, to the remote Moravian mountain village of Želary, where time has stopped, as he has agreed to hide her as his wife. They live in a modest cabin for two years, waiting for the Nazi occupation to end and begin to form a bond despite their differences.

Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) embark on a thrilling journey filled with sexual exploration and the investigation of their inner selves. After convincing the beautiful Luisa (Maribel Verdú) to take a trip with them to an imaginary beach, the trio heads off in search of adventure. Will the unstable, spontaneously exhibitionistic Luisa seduce one or both of the boys--and will their relationship change depending on the distribution of her favors?