Browse Movies : 2004 : Foreign

"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?

Itami, a young Japanese man, falls deeply in love with Cynthia, a beautiful Chinese girl. Their brief happiness ends when he is called home for his military service and they are forced to part. Three years later, Shanghai has been unofficially occupied by Japan. Cynthia - now known as Ding Hui—is working for Purple Butterfly, a resistance group planning to assassinate Yamamoto, head of the Japanese secret service. Itami is also in Shanghai, operating as a secret agent and reporting directly to Yamamoto.

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.

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.

Based on a concept the director and Abbas Kiarostami developed on a photography trip together, a man and a young woman (Leila Hatami of Leila) are stranded in a remote village after their car breaks down. The photographer and the sole adult male inhabitant, a schoolteacher, leave to get help while the young woman, herself childless, bonds with the children whose parents are nowhere to be found.

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.

A group of young geniuses are drawn together by a mysterious advertisement, then suspiciously abandoned on an island, where they scramble to sort out their collective fate.

An expressionist work comprised of surreal action involving: a hockey rink that houses a forgotten wax museum, where ghosts of dead lovers stroll; and a beauty salon where a demented doctor, wearing a corset, performs abortions.

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...

On a passenger train, a beautiful young woman traveling alone carries a handmade ceramic vase, intricately painted by her own hand, a gift for a distant lover. She meets a friendly, handsome young veterinarian, who tries to tell her that she should sell the valuable piece to him, instead of giving it away to her boyfriend for free. Simply to spite the persistent animal doctor, the young woman hurls the vase to the floor of the train, shattering it to pieces.

Anne Reid stars as May, an ordinary grandmother from the North of England. When her husband dies on a family visit to London, she recedes into the background of her busy, metropolitan children's lives. Stuck in an unfamiliar city, far from home, May fears that she has become another invisible old lady whose life is more or less over. Until, that is, she embarks on a passionate affair with Darren (Daniel Craig), a man half her age who is renovating her son's house and sleeping with her daughter.

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.

Something sinister is lurking under the surface of 10-year-old Michele's (Giuseppe Cristiano) idyllic summer in 1978. While the days in his remote sourthern Italian village are filled with the familiar routines of childhood, a chance discovery leads to a shocking revelation. Now, suddenly beyond the point-of-no-return, Michele digs further to find that even his own parents may be behind what's quickly becoming the country's most nefarious crime.

A young photographer (David Wissack) from Los Angeles takes his girlfriend (Katerina Golubeva) with him while looking for locations in the Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California for a photography shoot, where they find their lives changed by something horrible that happens in the desert...

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...

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.

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 is the story of two brothers in Glasgow, Harbour (Adrian Rawlins) and Wilbur (Jamie Sives), who inherit a used bookstore. The brothers discover that a chance encounter with a cleaning lady at the local hospital, Alice (Shirley Henderson), who's the single mother of a little girl, Mary (Lisa McKinlay), prompts them to reconsider the choices they've made in life, which might change all four of their lives.

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.

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.