In 2009, Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was covering Iran’s volatile elections for Newsweek. One of the few reporters living in the country with access to US media, he made an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a taped interview with comedian Jason Jones. The interview was intended as satire, but if the Tehran authorities got the joke they didn’t like it – and it would quickly came back to haunt Bahari when he was rousted from his family home and thrown into prison. Making his directorial debut, Jon Stewart tells the tale of Bahari’s months-long imprisonment and interrogation in this powerful and affecting docudrama featuring a potent and performance by Gael García Bernal recounting Bahari’s efforts to maintain his hope and his sanity in the face of isolation and persecution-through memories of his family, recollections of the music he loves, and thoughts of his wife and unborn child.
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Human lives grappling with all the flavors of exstential despair intersect in a deadpan collage of comic suffering.
Humble Maria, who outfits top London theater star Ned Kynaston, takes none of the credit for the male actor’s success at playing women. And because this is the 17th century, Maria, like other females, is prohibited from pursuing her dream of acting. But when powerful people support her, King Charles II lifts the ban on female stage performers. And just as Maria aided Ned, she needs his help to learn her new profession.
On the verge of achieving his dream career, Tomás allows his older brother Martin Farina an inside look at his life as a professional football player. Martin, never able to fulfill his own dream of playing football, steps into the world of Tomás and his teammates through the lens of his camera. However, the rest of the club has their own opinions, some viewing Martin as an intruder, as he exposes their most vulnerable moments, and their concerns for the future after the game has ended. Fulboy offers an uncensored, confessional look at how the athletes behind the most popular sport in the world behave during their time off the field. At the same time, Fulboy reflexively interrogates Farina’s aesthetic choices and point-of-view, as well as the viewer’s gaze at the male form.
The film is a story about love, sacrifice, and hope set against an Arthouse noir milieu, where its sharks, vampires, and victims when a reclusive billionaire (Robert Davi), comedy club owner (Leona Paraminski) and over the hill filmmaker Charlie Nabis (Dan Coplan) are drawn into a deadly game of conspiracy and murder as a Russian Oligarch fights to control California’s water supply.
Wild Is the Wind represents a (perhaps deliberate) reversal of the situation in The Rose Tattoo (1955). Whereas in Tattoo, Anna Magnani played a widow who could never find a man to measure up to her late husband, in Wind her character, Giola, marries widowed rancher Gino (Anthony Quinn), who is haunted by the memory of his first spouse. The situation is dicier in Wind, since Italian immigrant Gino’s deceased wife was Giola’s sister. Eventually tiring of her husband’s mood swings, Giola turns to his son, Bene (Anthony Franciosa), for emotional and sexual gratification. A Hollywood approximation of the Italian neorealist school of filmmaking, Wild Is the Wind was based on Furia, a story by Vittorio Nino Novarese. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Juan Garcia is a boy on the threshold of manhood living in a gang-controlled neighborhood. His role models could not be further apart: his older sister Angie, a single mom, struggling to gain a foothold in the white corporate world and his uncle Manny, an ex-gang member, who has fallen into an acting career playing gang bangers since his release from prison. With the future on his doorstep, Juan, like most boys, can only think of girls and is unaware of the judicial system’s hard line stance against gang affiliation.
A young woman doctor discovers something sinister going on in her hospital. Relatively healthy patients are having ‘complications’ during simple operations and ending up in comas. The patients are then shipped off to an institute that looks after them. The young doctor suspects there is more to this than meets the eye.
A fractured family is forced to confront what tore them apart at the eldest son’s wedding.
When Paul is diagnosed with young onset Frontotemporal Dementia at 58, his family comes closer together than ever before. Along the way, he and his middle son Jesse learn many things about each other by working on Paul’s old truck, finally taking it for one last fishing trip together.
