Browse Movies : Foreign (Page #5)

When her husband dies, an Israeli mother, Dafna (Orly Silbersatz Banai), must cope with both her own grief, that of her four children, and the economic problems that his passing leaves them with, as she tries to keep the family together and functioning.

This documentary captures what happened in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 12th, 2000 when Bus 174 was highjacked by an armed young man, Sandro do Nascimento, with a dozen passengers. Nascimento threatened to kill all of the passengers, but eventuallly agreed to surrender, as TV cameras were rolling and an entire nation was glued to their screens watching the event take place. Then, a police officer decided to fire at Nascimento anyway, accidentally killing one of the female passengers instead. What followed was a revolt among the city's population, enraged at police brutality. The film intertwines the story of the standoff with biographical information about Sandro do Nascimento, including his childhood as a survivor of the "Candelaria" child mass murders in the early 1990s, and the trauma of seeing his mother stabbed to death in front of him.

A murder and a suicide occur early one morning in a jewelry store. Behind this headline lies the story of a desperate man's feelings of humiliation in a world of social injustice... When his friend Ali shows him the contents of a lost purse, Hussein cannot imagine the large sum of money marked on a receipt for an expensive necklace. He knows that his pitiful salary will never be enough to afford such luxury. Hussein feels even lower on the social scale when a smooth-talking professional thief mistakes the two friends for petty crooks. Hussein receives yet another blow when he and Ali are denied entry to an uptown jewelry store because of their appearance. Hussein's job delivering pizzas allows him a full view of the contrast between rich and poor. He motorbikes every evening to neighborhoods he will never live in for a closer look at what goes on behind closed doors. The hypocrisy of the system is thrown in his face wherever he turns. But Hussein will taste the luxurious life for one night before his deep feelings of humiliation push him over the edge.

A Miami reporter travels to a small Ecuadorian village to cover a series of brutal murders and get the biggest story of his career, tracking a possible serial killer dubbed the Monster of Babahoyo.

Paris, 2013. Damien is a member of an elite police squadron, a special unit highly trained in martial arts and the precise physical skills necessary to navigate the treacherous urban landscape of Paris' future. He is now tasked with the most vital and dangerous mission of his career: a weapon of mass destruction has been concealed by the most powerful gang of the suburbs of District B13, a walled off section of Paris in which the criminals rule themselves. Damien must infiltrate the gang in order to either defuse the bomb or recover it.

After nine years, acclaimed writer/director Mamoru Oshii follows up his cult hit "Ghost in the Shell"—one of the biggest animé successes of all time—with the long-awaited sequel "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence". It is the year 2032 and the line between humans and machines has been blurred almost beyond distinction. Humans have forgotten that they are human and those that are left coexist with cyborgs (human spirits inhabiting entirely mechanized bodies) and dolls (robots with no human elements at all). Batou is a cyborg. His body is artificial: the only remnants left of his humanity are traces of his brain…and the memories of a woman called The Major. A detective for the government's covert anti-terrorist unit, Public Security Section 9, Batou is investigating the case of a gynoid—a hyper-realistic female robot created specifically for sexual companionship—who malfunctions and slaughters her owner. As Batou delves deeper into the investigation, questions arise about humanity's need to immortalize its image in dolls. The answers to those questions lead to the shocking truth behind the crime...and quite possibly the very meaning of life.

Teens Will and his best friend set off in search of a mysterious treasure in a race against a group of motley buccaneers, including the dastardly Black Soul Whistle and the lovely pirate princess Honky Tonk Hannah.

Winner of the Jury Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and the Official Russian Selection for Academy Award® Best Foreign Language Film, "House of Fools" (Dom Durakov) is a satirical look at war seen through the eyes of a beautiful woman who is literally madly in love. Based on a true story, "House of Fools" tells the tale of a young Chechen woman, Janna, who is one of several inmates living in a psychiatric hospital on the Russian border of Chechnya. Insulated from the world, the inmates are oblivious to the war that rages around them. In her dream world, Janna finds comfort when her imaginary fiancé (Bryan Adams, played by himself) sings her love songs.

The story centers on family honor killings among Muslims in Britain and other European countries.

Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man (Donnie Yen) has the perfect family, plenty of money, a beautiful house, and a blossoming martial arts academy. But when the Japanese occupy his hometown of Foshan during the Sino-Japanese war of 1937, Ip, like the rest of the locals, is forced into hard labor and brutal sparring matches for the enemy's amusement. His incredible skills soon catch the eye of a Japanese Colonel who wants Ip to teach Wing Chun to his soldiers.

Legendary criminal. Proud homosexual. Cabaret star. Passionate lover. Killer. Devoted father of seven adopted children. Saint or devil? Madame Satã. Born to slaves in the arid wasteland of Northern Brazil and sold by his mother at the age of 7, he pursued his freedom on the mean streets of Lapa, Rio de Janeiro. Jet-black, six feet tall, 180 pounds of proud muscle in a silk shirt and tight pants, a cutthroat razor in his back pocket. Karim Aïnouz's extraordinary portrait of the triumphs and tragedy of this explosive and paradoxical personality unfolds against the vibrant, sordid background of Lapa: thronging underworld of pimps and whores, of cut-throats, queers and artists, of dark bars and brothels thick with smoke, drenched in sweat and cheap perfume. A world run through with violence and raw desire, where desperate dreams spring from poverty and squalor.

At a deserted train station, a teacher and a gangster meet and realize that each might have been better suited to the other man's way of life. As a friendship of sorts develops between these opposite personalities, each starts to envy the other and by the week's end, everything will change for both of them.

Masuoka is a cameraman possessed by the craving to understand fear--what it is and where it ultimately leads. He wanders the Tokyo streets, a voyeur, hungrily looking for clues. Obsessing over the haunted expressions of the faces he has captured in his daily filming, in particular a man who committed a grisly suicide on the metro. He returns to the scene to better comprehend the dead man's reasoning. Following his final gaze leads Masuoka to a door, an entry into a bizarre, cavernous underworld. Here among the ghosts and the subterranean robots called DERO's he finds a beautiful young girl chained to a rock. Saving her from her imprisonment, he takes her home. But watching her from his web-cam at work each day he begins suspect there is something truly inhuman about this girl with sharp teeth and who walks on all fours. When he begins to uncover her horrifying secrets Masuoka realises that he has found the key to gaining the terrible knowledge he so craves.

During the early 1960s, Paris was an explosion of life. As the old gave way to the new, everything was in flux and the city was filled with an energy that promised cultural shifts and social change. Against this background, in a working class neighborhood, two unlikely characters--a young Jew and an elderly Muslim--begin a friendship. When we meet Moise, also known as Momo, he is in effect an orphan even tough he lives with prostitutes who treat him with genuine affection. Momo buys his groceries at the neighborhood shop, a crowded dark space owned and run by Ibrahim, a silent exotic looking man who sees and knows more than he lets on. After Momo is abandoned by his father, Ibrahim becomes the one grownup in Momo's life. Together they begin a journey that will change their lives forever.

Hye-ja is a single mom to 27-year-old Do-joon. Her son is her raison d'etre. Though an adult in years, Do-joon is naive and dependent on his mother, and a constant source of anxiety, often behaving in ways that are foolish or simply dangerous.

Walking home alone one night down a nearly empty city street, he encounters a young girl who he follows for a while before she disappears into a dark alley. The next morning, she is found dead in an abandoned building and Do-joon is accused of her murder.

Thanks to an inefficient lawyer and an apathetic police force, Do-joon's case is quickly closed, but his mother refuses to let this be the end of the story. Trusting no one, Hye-ja's maternal instincts kick into overdrive, and she sets out to find the girl's killer and prove her son's innocence.

This is the story of Noi (Tomas Lemarquis), an intelligent 17-year-old boy who dreams of escaping from his hometown in the remote fjord regions of Northern Iceland with Iris, a girl from the city who works at the local gas station, because he is bored and frustrated with the limitations that small town life impose on him. Meanwhile, the locals perceive Noi's lack of ambition within their framework as a sign that he's just their next village idiot in training...

This is a sex comedy about memory loss, as office worker Graham (Eduardo Noriega) has recently suffered a complete memory loss from a martial arts-related accident, which means that every time he has sex with Irene, one of the secretaries, he forgets about it an hour later, so every time is the first time...

A love story spanning two continents, "Nowhere in Africa" is the extraordinary true tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel (Juliane Kohler) and their five-year-old daughter Regina each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country-learning the local language and customs, and finding a friend in Owuor, the farm's cook. As the war rages on the other side of the world, the trio's relationships to their strange environment become increasingly complicated as Jettel grows more self-assured and Walter more haunted by the life they left behind. As they eventually learn to cherish their life in Africa, they also endeavor to find a way back to each other.

Bruno Le Roux (Elie Belvaux) breaks out of the prison in which he's served 15 years of a life sentence for his membership in an armed wing of a left-wing revolutionary movement, the Popular Army. Bruno is determined to continue the fight against capitalist society, and to avenge his fallen comrades-in-arms. But most of his former associates are dead or behind bars, and the others are either unwilling or untrustworthy. He seeks help from former radical Jeanne (Catherine Frot), but she's now a mother and schoolteacher. Another former contact is local crime boss Jaquillat (Patrick Descamps). Years earlier, Bruno and Jaquillat had been allies in a bank robbery, but now Jaquillat's drug dealing is seriously constrained by the massive police presence as the manhunt for Bruno continues. It's in Jaquillat's interests to finish off Bruno. An alliance between Jaquillat and local cop Pascal Manise (Gilbert Melki) makes things even more dangerous for Bruno. Whatever ideals Bruno might once have had have been distorted by imprisonment and suffering. Bruno is now willing to kill for the most casual reasons -- he's turned into a psychopath with nothing to lose. However, he finds an unexpected ally in Agnes (Dominique Blanc), Manise's junkie wife. Bruno helps her when she is attacked by a street dealer, and, without really knowing who he is, she finds him a place to stay, in the chalet owned by her friend, Cecile (Ornella Muti).

The film follows the structure of Dante's masterwork, beginning in Hell. In Godard's hands, hell becomes a devastating but beautifully collected montage of war images. War - be it World War II, Algeria, Vietnam, Israel or Bosnia - is a constant in his films, but never has he pieced together an assemblage of such poetic power. Purgatory finds Godard himself in Sarajevo, where he has been invited to attend a European literary conference with other artists and writers. Here we are introduced to a young French-Jewish journalist based in Israel who has come to Sarajevo to see a place "where reconciliation is possible." Paradise is the most enigmatic section of the film, where the journalist finds peace by the water on a small beach guarded by American Marines.