2019 Least Anticipated Movies (Page #25)

There are three stories in the anthology: Kanini & Kanino, Life Ain't Gonna Lose, and Invisible. Kanini & Kanino is directed by Academy Award-nominee Hiromasa Yonebayashi (When Marnie Was There, Mary and The Witch's Flower); Life Ain't Gonna Lose, featuring the voice of Maggie Q (Nikita, Designated Survivor), is helmed by Yoshiyuki Momose; and Invisible director Akihiko Yamashita. Together, the stories explore ideas of heroism in their own unique way, fully utilizing the infinite visual and storytelling potential of the short film format.

Under the gloomy sky of a small town in northern China, different protagonists’ lives are intertwined in this furious tale of nihilistic rage. While protecting his friend from a dangerous school bully, 16-year-old WEI Bu pushes the tormentor down a staircase. WEI escapes the scene and later learns that the bully is hospitalized and gravely injured. WEI’s neighbor, the 60-year-old WANG Jin, is estranged from his family and, with nothing to lose, decides to join him. Later the pair is joined by HUANG Ling, WEI’s classmate. She is bedeviled by an destructive affair with a married school official. Together, this unlikely and desperate trio, decide their only hope is to flee as the bully’s gangster brother, enraged parents and vindictive school authorities all go on a cold-blooded hunt for WEI across town. As WEI threads his way through the urban wilderness, he begins to come to terms with his own lost life. In the end, he boards a long-distance bus with HUANG and WANG toward a city in Manchuria, where it is a rumored that a circus elephant is said to be sitting still, seeming oblivious to pain and tribulations of the world at large.

The year is 1613, Shakespeare is acknowledged as the greatest writer of the age. But disaster strikes when his renowned Globe Theatre burns to the ground, and devastated, Shakespeare returns to Stratford, where he must face a troubled past and a neglected family. Haunted by the death of his only son Hamnet, he struggles to mend the broken relationships with his wife and daughters. In so doing, he is ruthlessly forced to examine his own failings as husband and father. His very personal search for the truth uncovers secrets and lies within a family at war.

Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles tells the true story of how Luis Buñuel made his second movie. Paris, 1930. Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel are main figures of the Surrealist movement, but Buñuel is left penniless after a scandal surrounding his film L'Age d'Or. However, his good friend, the sculptor Ramón Acín, buys a lottery ticket with the promise that, if he wins, he will pay for his next film. Incredibly, luck is on their side, and so they set out to make the movie, an ambitious documentary on the Las Hurdes region in Spain.

Based on the award-winning novel, a teenager’s gift of premonition becomes a curse when after predicting the death of one of his friends, Luke Hunter (Cameron Monaghan) is dubbed the ‘prophet of death’ by a local news reporter. A media madhouse infiltrates Luke’s life, everyone in his Michigan hometown desperate to know more. Luke holds everyone at arm’s length – the relentless news crew, his mother (Juliette Lewis) and father, even Faith (Peyton List), the girl he has secretly loved for as long as he can remember – telling no one that the premonitions keep happening. Troubled and confused, Luke must make sense of his newfound abilities in this fast-moving tale of struggling youth.

A man who has everything finds out he has the one thing he never wanted. Nick Pearson, a former lothario and author of a best-selling memoir titled "I Hate Kids", is about to marry the woman of his dreams (Rachel Boston) who shares his disinterest in becoming a parent. Everything changes when awkward 13-year-old Mason (Julian Feder) interrupts their rehearsal dinner claiming to be Nicks son. With the aid of flamboyant radio show psychic The Amazing Fabular (Tituss Burgess) and with just days until the wedding, the three strangers embark on a wild road trip to find out which of a dozen eccentric women from Nicks past could possibly be Masons mother.

Local boxer, Chuck Wepner was slinging liquor in Bayonne, New Jersey when he got the call. Chuck was going to fight the Heavy Weight Champion of the World, Muhammad Ali. Chuck trained hard, pushing himself to the limit so he could go toe to toe with the greatest fighter of all time. His heroic battle with Ali was only the beginning of a wild ride that takes Chuck from the lows of New Jersey to highs of Hollywood.

An unknown MMA fighter, Ty Matthews, beats the undefeated champion at a local gym. Overnight, Ty becomes the underdog champion of the world - with a title fight on the horizon. But when the female reporter covering the story is found dead, Ty becomes the murder suspect; as he was last seen with her leaving a bar late at night. His only alibi is his girlfriend who is aware of him arriving home late that night. A blackout, a dead body, and incriminating circumstances puts Ty in the middle of a mystery. Like Bogart in “In a Lonely Place” he finds himself under the microscope of a murder, which he doesn’t know if he committed.

A mid-length stop-motion animated film set in the bitter milieu of Belgium-occupied Congo in the late 19th century that turns a critical gaze on the colonists themselves.

Casey Lindeweiler (John Robinson) inherits the last remaining independent radio station in town, WTYT 960, only to find the station is in financial shambles and in the ratings basement. To right the sinking ship, Casey pulls out one of the oldest tricks in radio, the wacky contest. His idea is to host a billboard sitting contest where four people will live on a catwalk in front of a billboard in hopes of winning “nine-sixty” thousand dollars and a mobile home. All they have to do is be the last one living on the billboard. Unprepared for the spotlight, Casey attempts to rise to the challenge of running a business, as he has to worry about his contestants, the competition, the local authorities, the media’s interpretation of his contest, and mother nature.

Cambodia, April 1975. Chou is a young woman whose everyday world is suddenly upended by the arrival of the Khmer Rouge regime. During the chaos of the forced exile from their home, Chou and her husband are separated from their 4-year-old son, who has been sent to an unknown location. As she navigates her new reality, working in the fields day and night under the careful watch of soldiers, and surviving the small indignities and harrowing realities of the increasingly grim work camps, Chou remains steadfast in her determination to reunite her family - even if it means risking everything.

Two lives intersect in Mumbai and go along together. A struggling street photographer, pressured to marry by his grandmother, convinces a shy stranger to pose as his fiancée. The pair develops a connection that transforms them in ways that they could not expect.

The story of Jim McNeely (Lane Garrison), a young man thrust into the vibrant and brutal West Texas oilfields in 1939. In a state gushing with oil and filled with ambition, McNeely settles into a small-town community that is slowly overcoming the trauma of the Great Depression. The formidable path before him is riddled with obstacles – overbearing bosses who try to keep him down, powerful oilmen who are reluctant to invest in a fresh face, and women who see salvation in his charms – but he finds a glimmer of hope with his first loves: new wife Lee Montgomery (Ali Cobrin) and drilling for oil. With everything falling into place to ascend to the top of the oil chain, McNeely stumbles upwards through his success and in turn jeopardizes his desperate longing to conquer this brave new world of influence and wealth.

A high school romance is complicated by the girl's Muslim faith. Her father is prepared to arrange her marriage according to their family’s cultural tradition.