Browse Movies : Sony Pictures Classics : 2004

Harvard, MBA-educated biotech executive John Henry "Jack" Armstrong (Anthony Mackie) gets fired when he informs on his bosses and initiates an investigation into their business dealings by the Securities & Exchange Commission. Branded a whistle-blower and therefore unemployable, Jack desperately needs to make a living. When his former girlfriend Fatima (Kerry Washington), a high powered businesswoman and now a lesbian, offers him cash to impregnate her and her new girlfriend Alex (Dania Ramirez), Jack is persuaded by the chance to make "easy" money. Word spreads and soon Jack is in the baby-making business at $10,000 a tryst. Lesbians with a desire for motherhood and the cash to spare are lining up to seek his services. But, between the attempts by his former employers to frame him for securities fraud and his dubious fathering activities, Jack finds his life, all at once, becoming very complicated.

"Young Adam" is David McKenzie's adaptation of Alexander Trocchi's novel, a romantic murder mystery set on a barge in the canals of Scotland. Lovely photography by Giles Nuttgens, complemented by a lonely score by David Byrne, provides a picturesque backdrop for what is otherwise a seedy story of morality gone far astray and hopelessness taking hold of everyday life, with sex as the only outlet. Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton both lend excellent performances to the film, acting out a strained relationship of carnal misgiving that is their mutual respite. Working on a barge that travels to ports between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Joe (McGregor) is a randy ol' chap. He befriends Les (Peter Mullen) as they labor hard days shoveling coal and pass their evenings over pints and darts in the local pubs. But Joe is simply positioning himself to seduce Les' wife, Ella (Swinton), who he easily and frequently beds. A steamy affair with a heavy dose of on-screen coitus eventually leads to trouble for all three. A subplot concerns Joe's past romance with a girl (Emily Mortimer) whose mysterious death is reported in local papers, with flashbacks to raunchy sexual interludes representing his fondest memories of her.

Tale of amorous folly and revenge set in the world of the London stage in the late 1930's. Reigning diva Julia Lambert's success and fame grow suddenly wearisome. She falls head over heels for a young American, Tom, and begins a passionate May - December affair. When she realizes that Tom is just a young social climber whose real passion is ambitious young starlet Avice Crichton, Julia begins to plot a delightful revenge.

This is the story of two men, one of whom is a film director, in Spain who meet again 20 years after they attended a Catholic school together as children during the time of Franco's rule. The film will flash back to extended sequences from their youths, and will also include a movie-within-the-movie sequence.

In June 1940, as politicians, journalists, society figures, demi-mondaines and spies from all sides all meet up at the Hotel Splendide in Bordeaux, a young man has to choose between a famous actress and an impassioned student, between politicians and hoodlums, between insouciance and adulthood.

"House of Flying Daggers" is set in the year 859AD as China's once flourishing Tang Dynasty is in decline. Unrest is raging throughout the land, and the corrupt government is locked in battle with rebel armies that are forming in protest. The largest, and most prestigious of these is the "House of Flying Daggers", which is growing ever more powerful under a mysterious new leader. Two local captains, Leo (Lau) and Jin (Kaneshiro) are ordered to capture the new leader and the two hatch an elaborate plan. Captain Jin will pretend to be a lone warrior called Wind and rescue the beautiful, blind revolutionary Mei (Ziyi), from prison, earning her trust and escorting her to the secret headquarters of the House of Flying Daggers. The plan works, but to their surprise, Jin and Mei fall deeply in love on their long journey to the House. Danger lurks in the forest surrounding them, and the wind is still, as if sensing the tension in the air. What lies ahead for Jin and Mei, these star-crossed lovers? If this is true love, then why are there plots in their heads, and secrets in their hearts?

The exquisitely beautiful and very human drama "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring", from director Kim Ki-Duk, is entirely set on and around a tree-lined lake where a tiny Buddhist monastery floats on a raft amidst a breath-taking landscape. The film is divided into five segments with each season representing a stage in a man's life. Under the vigilant eyes of Old Monk, Child Monk learns a hard lesson about the nature of sorrow when some of his childish games turn cruel. In the intensity and lushness of summer, the monk, now a young man, experiences the power of lust, a desire that will ultimately lead him, as an adult, to dark deeds. With winter, strikingly set on the ice and snow-covered lake, the man atones for his past actions, and spring starts the cycle anew...

A comic clash of cultures, values and sexuality, Touch of Pink is a romantic comedy featuring Alim (Jimi Mistry), a young South Asian-Canadian, now living in London, who is so caught up in the romance, style and dreams of the old movies that he thinks he's living with the spirit of Cary Grant (Kyle MacLachlan). But Alim's ideal life in London with lover Giles (Kristen Holden-Ried) begins to unravel when his mother Nuru (Suleka Mathew) shows up. She's come to London to find Alim a proper Ismaili-Muslim girlfriend and to convince him to come home to Canada and join the family for his cousin's spectacular wedding. Once in Toronto, Alim's different worlds begin to collide and he has to choose between his fantasy life with Cary and the earthier pleasures of real life.

It is the 1940s and the Czech lands have been occupied by the Nazis. Eliska is a young woman who was unable to complete medical school because the Germans closed the universities and now works as a nurse in a city hospital. She is also involved in the resistance movement along with her lover, the surgeon Richard, and their friend Dr. Chldek. One night, a man from a rural mountain area is brought to the hospital with serious injuries and desperately needs a transfusion. Eliska is the only one with the same blood type. Her blood saves his life and a connection is formed between the two that in the course of the story becomes an extraordinarily strong relationship between the modern, cosmopolitan, and educated Eliska and the barbaric, salt of the earth man with the soul of a child, Joza. The resistance group that the doctors are involved in is discovered and hunted by the Gestapo and suddenly their lives are threatened. While Eliska's lover, Richard, flees the country overnight, the group quickly has to find a different safe haven for her. They ask Joza, the patient whose life she saved with her blood, to hide her in his remote mountain cabin. Eliska is forced to leave her urban life and all at once become a new woman: Hana, the wife of a mountain man. Her new home is the wild mountain village where time stopped one hundred and fifty years ago called Zelary.

We come to know the rapist Gilson, tried and sentenced by the Law Behind Bars; Zico and Deusdete, inseparable half brothers who, in jail, become each other's assassins; Highness and his shrewd balancing act between women and heists; Old Chico, a Zen master in the ways of the dungeon, at last on the brink of his long-awaited freedom; Warden Pires, who oversees the prison with the perspicacity of a tightrope walker; Ebony, the true leader of the inmate community and the arbiter of all its contentions; the religious conversion of the assasin, Dagger, the rise and fall of the surfer Ezequiel; Antonio Carlos, Claudiomiro and, coming between them like a knife, and depraved Dina; the existentialist philosopher No Way and his love affair with the divine lady Di. The narrative of the film is crafted like a puzzle with one story giving way to another for of surrealist, uniquely Brazilian collage of tragedy.

When 18 year old Guy Malyon takes up a scholarship at Cambridge University his world is forever changed following a passionate affair with a stunning, aristocratic but hedonistic fellow student, Gilda Besse, which takes him across Europe from the killing fields of Spain's Civil War to occupied France... before a dangerous secret threatens to tear them apart.

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.

" Riding Giants" takes us along surfing's timeline from it's early Polynesian roots, to its rebirth in the early 20th Century, to the development of a fledgling surf culture along the coast of Southern California in the 1940s highlighting the group of extraordinary adventurers that emerged: surfers who, not satisfied with the mere recreational and social aspects of the sport, began searching for bigger and bigger waves, pushing the boundaries of performance to explore the "unridden realm." Riding Giants is the story of these big wave riders, of where and how their quest began, of the classic characters who throughout the eras chased their dreams out into the blue water, and of the surfers who still do today, riding 50, 60 and even 70 foot waves in a manner once considered the realm of fantasy.

Set in 16th century Venice, this adaptation of the Shakespeare play tells the story of Antonio, who goes into debt with moneylendor Shylock (Al Pacino) so his friend Bassanio can impress the object of his affection, Portia.