Browse Movies : 2003 : Rating Not Available (Page #3)

This documentary examines the short life of Australian-born Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) whose resume included being a famous fashion designer, a 1980s gay nightclub icon in London (as host of the Taboo nightclub), outrageous performance artist, lead singer of the art rock group Minty and the costume designer for the Michael Clarke Dance Company.

Focuses on Filomena Capadscio, the matriarch of a family who is abruptly visited by tragedy. Filomena's husband and two sons are brutally murdered by the sons of Firmino Santos Guerra. Thirty years earlier, Filomena had been engaged to Santos Guerra but left him before their wedding to marry his rival Borges Capadscio. The result of this union filled Santos Guerra with rage and promise to someday exact revenge on the newly married couple. Filomena buries her husband and sons and begins to set plans to have revenge against the Santos Guerra family. She brings together her three daughters (Maria Francisca, Maria Rosa and Maria Pia) and sends them off into the backlands of Brazil to locate and hire three ruthless killers. Maria Francisca has to find the gunman known as Zi das Cobras, who has not spoken to a woman since the death of his mother. Maria Rosa looks for Chief Tensrio, a backwoods cop who is also a knife specialist, and convince him to break the laws he defends. Maria Pia goes off in search of Jesulino Cruz, also known as "The Devil's Horse," but there is a slight obstacle in her path: this killer is locked up in prison."

In 1973, Alan Oakley, a 24 year old Republican journalist working for the Los Angeles Chronicle, has a promising future sure to make his military father proud. At the other end of the spectrum, certain to strike shame into conservatives everywhere is Tommy Ballenger, a 19 year old Texas native relocated to California to form "Out Loud", a gay civil rights group. When a chance meeting brings these opposites together, the attraction is obvious to everyone except Alan, who is desperately trying to stick to the program. Stumbling all the way, the neurotic Alan falls in love and the two form a loving relationship. A jealous lawyer publishes Alan's anti-gay book, however, which he wrote before meeting Tommy. This breaks up their relationship, but later they are reunited once again.

This documentary is an intimate portrayal of several months at a one-room elementary schoolhouse in a small village (Saint-Etienne Sur Usson) in rural France, where a single teacher, Georges Lopez, gives his small class of thirteen students, ages 3-10, the sort of attention that is dwindling in many other schools in France (and elsehwere), where crowded classrooms are the norm.

This documentary explores the lives and worlds of women who explore their masculine sides as "drag kings," using a legendary Drag King Night in New York as a starting point to follow some of the women into their lives, whether their drag persona be an identity they assume part or full-time. Drag kings in London and Zurich are also interviewed, including some who are experimenting with hormones to accelerate their masculinity.

Set in Los Angeles at home of the middle-class Hong family, a drama thriller in which many layers of deception in a bi-cultural clan are unraveled--upon the arrival of an intruder brandishing a gun.

Set in Toronto, a romantic tale which revolves around Rahul Seth, a Westernized, young dot.com millionaire, and his unconventional relationship with the beautiful and wild Sue Singh. Rahul is devastated after the untimely death of his beautiful, pop artist, blonde girlfriend Kimberly. To make matters worse, he is under extreme pressure from his family to get engaged to a good Hindu girl before his sister's upcoming wedding. Lest one forgets, according to the popular Hindu adage, 'the best cure for a broken heart is marriage'. Desperate, he hires the services of the gorgeous Sue, a local escort girl, to pretend to be his fiancée during the ten days of celebration, leading up to his sister's marriage ceremony. While Rahul is the scion of a typically successful NRI family, Sue is the daughter of a humble car mechanic and--professionally speaking--is one of the highest paid escorts in Toronto. They enter into the relationship as opposites. However, during this fateful period of much song, dance and merriment, Rahul and Sue's relationship slowly transcends that of employer and employee. With her passion for life, Sue manages to break through Rahul's hardened exterior to reveal a sensitive man who is not as emotionally dead as he would like to believe. In turn, Rahul's strong personality and advice enables Sue to see her parents in a more positive light.

In the small, rural town of Sandusky, Ohio, two goth kids are each other's best friends, sharing their experiences of being the town outsiders. Teenage photography enthusiast Clive (Kett Turton) is on his way towards coming fully out of the closet, and Gypsy (Sara Rue) is an overweight 25-year-old girl with a love of Stevie Nicks music and a low-pay job at the photo hut in the parking lot of the local mall. When the duo hears about a "Night of a Thousand Stevies" karaoke show in New York City, they decide to make a road trip of it as a way to escape the drudgery of small-town Ohio in the heady nightlife of NYC.

Follows various escapades going on inside a hotel: a film being shot, an entertainment news crew tracking the film's production, a mysterious surgical operation and a torture chamber in the hotel basement. All this is tied to a murder subplot.

A moving documentary from director Jennifer Dworkin, "Love and Diane" tells the hard tale of Diane, whose crack cocaine drug addiction in the 1980s resulted in social services taking each of her six children out of her care for more stable lives in foster homes and group homes. Now Diane is clean, and the oldest of her children, Love, is 18-years-old, HIV positive, and has a baby boy. Diane tries to reunite the family, which consists of five teenagers (one of her sons died), but life for them is not easy. At the beginning of the film they are all living together in a Brooklyn, New York apartment. But slowly things go awry. Diane and Love quarrel and social services comes to take the baby away. Neglect charges are filed against Love and social services separates her sisters into another living situation. Their younger brother stops going to school and then also leaves the apartment, no longer interested in living with his mother or with his family. A moving and emotional look at a family struggling against difficult odds to do what's best, LOVE & DIANE is mostly made up of conversations between Diane, Love, and the family. They talk about the hardships they've endured, how they got through difficult times, and how they pray for a brighter future. All combined, it is a truly affecting portrait of a family trying to keep together.

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.

Phobia-addled con artist Roy (Nicolas Cage) and his protégé Frank (Sam Rockwell) are on the verge of pulling off a lucrative swindle when the unexpected arrival of Roy's teenage daughter Angela (Alison Lohman) disrupts his carefully-ordered life and jeopardizes his high-risk scam.

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).

Set shortly after World War II in Berlin, this is the story of an American officer's (Harvey Keitel) prosecution of German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (Stellan Skarsgard) as part of the Allied Forces' de-Nazification trials. As the investigation progresses, the American, wanting to convict a man he sees as a Jew-killing Nazi is brought face-to-face into conflict with a man consumed entirely by his art, not politics.

John Person (Jon Favreau), a struggling actor on the verge of eviction from his Hollywood studio apartment, goes against his better judgement -- and that of his pretty neighbor Grace (Joey Lauren Adams) -- and accepts an offer from his strange neighbor Neely (Bud Cort) to courier a blue suitcase up to the desert truck stop of Baker, California. His instructions are simple: deliver the suitcase to a trucker called Cowboy (Sean Bean) and collect $27 thousand. Oh yeah, and he has to defend the suitcase with his life. Naturally, nothing goes according to plan once John arrives. The Cowboy is nowhere to be found, John meets with some kooky alien-obsessed locals and Special Agent Banks (Kelsey Grammer) questions John about the mysterious decapitation of Neely and about other missing persons. When the final showdown approaches, John is faced with a choice that could change his life forever. Has the whole town gone mad? Or are the loony locals, who he dismissed as crazy, the only sane ones in this strange parallel universe called The Big Empty?

Nominated for two Cesar awards in 2002, including Best First Feature Film, "The Girl From Paris" tells the story of Sandrine, a young Parisienne who decides to leave the city and pursue her dream of becoming a farmer. Adrien is the older, taciturn farmer who agrees to sell Sandrine his land and herd of goats before retiring to Grenoble. Sandrine allows Adrien stay at the farm for eighteen months, then begins renovations in earnest. Sandrine succeeds where Adrien was sure she would fail; she earns a living in the spring and summer by opening up the farm to tourists and selling goat cheese over the Internet. But the arrival of winter brings a tide change and conflicting emotions: Sandrine faces the harsh isolation of the Rhone-Alps while forming a growing attachment to Adrien. Between their mutual curiosity and misunderstandings, Sandrine and Adrien are forced to live side by side when the only thing they share is their love for mountains and nature.

Set in the world's holiest city during the dawn of the new century as fanatical Christians from across the globe arrive in hopes of provoking a confrontation between the many extremist Arabs and Jews, the plot of "The Holy Land" focuses on Menachem Weinbaum ("Mendy"),a young rabbinical student who is restless to learn about the bigger world. On the advice of his slightly demented teacher, Mendy visits a brothel in Tel Aviv so he can be rid of his 'madness' and return tohis studies. There he meets Sasha, a nineteen-year-old Russian prostitute, whose dire situation and immense beauty captivates him. But Mendy's world really opens up when he discovers Mike's Place, a real-life magnet for the lost souls who flock to Jerusalem. A place where Arabs, Christians and Jews drink side by side, Mike's Place introduces Mendy to a gun-toting American-born settler, a shady entrepreneurial Arab and a slew of American expatriates, forever changed by the sixties, who act out biblical roles. As Mendy becomes more immersed in this culture of the millennium he begins to wonder if Mike and his band of misfits are as harmless as they seem? Or are they intent on provoking Armageddon? A story of doomed, passionate love and coming of age in troubled times -- set in a world-famous place not unlike Rick's Cafe American or the Cantina in "Star Wars" -- "The Holy Land" explores the underbelly of real life in Jerusalem after the sun goes down and the tourists and Orthodox families go to sleep.

On April 11th, 2002, Irish documentarians Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain were in Venezuela, with the intention of making a movie about the nation's left-leaning (and Castro-inspired) democratic president, Hugo Chavez, whose support comes mostly from the country's impoverished, who make up 80% of the population (versus past leaders who were often supported by the country's big money minority, like the petroleum industry). Although they did accomplish that, the film took a seriously unexpected turn when the filmmakers found themselves in the heart of a coup d'etat, trapped in the president's palace as Chavez's right-wing oligarchic opposition overthrew the leader. Chavez was able to return to power within 48 hours, buoyed by public support, but this film captures those frightening moments and days in which a nation's political future was fought over using both bullets and manipulation of the media. Venezuela's television networks, all owned by oil companies except for the state channel which the coup brought down, reported distorted interpretations of the coup, as proven by this movie's footage, which was then picked up by international news organizations like CNN. This movie also addresses what the White House thought about this coup in the world's fifth largest producer of oil (providing 14% of the United States' petroleum).