2020 Least Anticipated Movies (Page #24)

An intoxicating exploration of contemporary Tokyo’s duality, Lost Girls & Love Hotels stars Alexandra Daddario (TV’s “True Detective”, San Andreas), Takehiro Hira (The Fighter Pilot, The Floating Castle) and Carice Van Houten (Valkyrie, Black Book). Based on screenwriter Catherine Hanrahan’s book of the same name, and directed by William Olsson, the film is a provocative journey inviting you to get lost within the darkest corridors of Japan in hopes of experiencing fleeting moments of beauty. We follow the passionate tale of love and lust between a haunted American English teacher Margaret (Daddario) and a dashing Yakuza named Kazu (Takehiro Hira) as their affair tears them apart and reshapes them across Tokyo’s landscape of dive bars, alleyways and three-hour love hotels.

Paul lives an isolated life with his father in upstate New York. He finds making friends impossible due to a rare condition he has known as congenital hypertrichosis - an affliction that causes an abnormal amount of hair growth all over his face and body. On his 13th birthday, Paul receives a mysterious gift that compels him to run away and seek out the mother he has never known.

When Quinn Ackerman’s (Sabrina Carpenter) admission to the college of her dreams depends on her performance at a dance competition, she forms a ragtag group of dancers to take on the best squad in school...now she just needs to learn how to dance.

Two criminals break into a disgraced doctor’s home to be given medical attention after one of them is shot during a robbery gone wrong. Knowing that he lacks the expertise to help the injured trespasser, the doctor must protect his family at all costs.

Using interviews and rare archival footage, John Lewis: Good Trouble chronicles Lewis’ 60-plus years of social activism and legislative action on civil rights, voting rights, gun control, health-care reform and immigration. Using present-day interviews with Lewis, now 79 years old, Porter explores his childhood experiences, his inspiring family and his fateful meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957. In addition to her interviews with Lewis and his family, Porter’s primarily cinéma verité film also includes interviews with political leaders, Congressional colleagues, and other people who figure prominently in his life.

Chick Fight follows Anna (Malin Akerman) as she navigates a particularly challenging juncture in her life: she still hasn’t reconciled with the recent death of her adored mother, she’s just discovered that her loving and supportive father is gay (which she totally supports, but the deception cuts deep), and she accidentally burns down her uninsured coffee shop when she discovers a casually thrown joint and a spilled bottle of moonshine don’t exactly mix. Knowing Anna needs to be abruptly shaken and stirred from her deep funk, her best friend Charleen (Dulcé Sloan) takes Anna to an all women underground fight club. It's here that Anna encounters an eclectic cast of characters, including the intimidatingly perfect and most brutally efficient fighter of the club, Olivia (Bella Thorne), who quickly becomes a rival in and out of the ring. With the help of an eccentric and reclusive trainer Jack Murphy (Alec Baldwin), Anna slowly rediscovers herself, her inner strength and true purpose in the most primal of ways.

Set in a provocatively unspecified moment in Italy’s history yet adapted from a 1909 novel by American author Jack London, Martin Eden is a passionate and enthralling narrative fresco in the tradition of the great Italian classics. Martin (played by the marvelously committed Luca Marinelli) is a self-taught proletarian with artistic aspirations who hopes that his dreams of becoming a writer will help him rise above his station and marry a wealthy young university student (Jessica Cressy). The twinned dissatisfactions of working-class toil and bourgeois success lead to political reawakening and destructive anxiety in this enveloping, superbly mounted bildungsroman.

12-year-old Abe is an aspiring chef, but his family—half-Israeli, half-Palestinian—have never had a meal together without a fight. But when Abe ditches his traditional summer camp to spend time with radical street chef Chico, his mentor’s fusion cuisine inspires him to unite his family through food. Abe decides to cook a meal that will bring everyone to the table, but he’s about to learn that the kitchen can’t heal some age-old divides.

Spaceship Earth is the true, stranger-than-fiction, adventure of eight visionaries who in 1991 spent two years quarantined inside of a self-engineered replica of Earth’s ecosystem called BIOSPHERE 2. The experiment was a worldwide phenomenon, chronicling daily existence in the face of life threatening ecological disaster and a growing criticism that it was nothing more than a cult. The bizarre story is both a cautionary tale and a hopeful lesson of how a small group of dreamers can potentially reimagine a new world.

Deep in the forests of Piedmont, Italy, a handful of men, seventy or eighty years young, hunt for the rare and expensive white Alba truffle—which to date has resisted all of modern science's efforts at cultivation. They're guided by a secret culture and training passed down through generations, as well as by the noses of their cherished and expertly-trained dogs. They live a simpler, slower way of life, in harmony with their loyal animals and their picture-perfect land, seemingly straight out of a fairy tale. They're untethered to cell phone screens or the Internet, opting instead to make their food and drink by hand and prioritizing in-person connections and community.

The demand for white truffles increases year after year, even as the supply decreases. As a result of climate change, deforestation, and the lack of young people taking up the mantle, the truffle hunters' secrets are more coveted than ever. However, as it soon becomes clear, these ageing men may just hold something much more valuable than even this prized delicacy: the secret to a rich and meaningful life.

In the closed world of an elite Pennsylvania boarding school, Haldwell, the student body is run by five factions. Seventeen-year-old Selah Summers (Lovie Simone) runs the most dominant group, the Spades, with unshakable poise, as they cater to the most classic of vices and supply students with coveted, illegal alcohol and pills. Tensions between the factions escalate, and when Selah’s best friend/right hand Maxxie (MOONLIGHT’s Jharrel Jerome) becomes distracted by a new love, Selah takes on a protégée, enamored sophomore Paloma (Celeste O'Connor), to whom she imparts her wisdom on ruling the school. But with graduation looming and Paloma proving an impressively quick study, Selah’s fears turn sinister as she grapples with losing the control by which she defines herself.

For her entire life, the cult she was born into has been all that teenage Selah (Raffey Cassidy) has known. Along with a band of similarly cloistered young women she lives seemingly unstuck in time, cut off from modern society in a remote forest commune presided over by a man called Shepherd (Michiel Huisman), a controlling, messiah-like figure with a frightening dark side. But when her insular world is rocked by a series of nightmarish visions and disturbing revelations, Selah begins to question everything about her existence—including her allegiance to the increasingly dangerous Shepherd.

Follows a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers in post-World War II Hollywood as they try to make it in Tinseltown — no matter the cost. Each character offers a unique glimpse behind the gilded curtain of Hollywood's Golden Age, spotlighting the unfair systems and biases across race, gender and sexuality that continue to this day.

A grieving teenager (Alex Wolff) befriends his charismatic but troubled next-door neighbor (Imogen Poots), only to become ensnared in a world of addiction and violence as the opioid epidemic takes hold of their small town.

Following his parents’ separation, a rebellious teenage boy, Ben, is sent to live with his father for the summer and work at the local marina in order to gain some form of discipline. The idyllic tourist town offers little solace for him, however, as he is forced to deal with the local, privileged teens and his father’s new girlfriend. Ben’s problems grow increasingly disturbing when he makes a chilling discovery about the family renting the house next door. A malevolent spirit from the woods has taken a hold of the parents and starts playing a sinister game of house, preying upon the children and wiping away any trace of their existence. Ben’s suspicions of the supernatural horrors go unheeded and he launches a perilous crusade in order to put an end to the skin-walking witch’s reign of terror.

The coming of age story of Ulysses set in imaginary country Greatland, whose citizens, the “Greats” are too evolved to bother with government, work, education, law, technology or money. Trapped in this world of perpetual fun and inter-species love ruled by a universal Mother, Ulysses must cross the forbidden frontier to save his childhood sweetheart, as an absurd election and a deadly Virus lead to chaos and violence.

Sarah Collins (Sarah Bolger) is a single mother struggling to raise two young children while searching for answers about the unsolved murder of her husband. After being coerced into helping a low-level drug dealer, she finds herself the target of a dangerous crime boss. Desperate to keep her family safe, Sarah turns the tables on her victimizers in one final act of vengeance.

Mickey Rourke and Bai Ling star in this epic tale of courage and heroism in a time of war. During the invasion of Parthia, two Roman legions have been brought to a standstill in the snowy mountains of Armenia, leaving them slowly dying in the freezing cold. The rest of the Roman army is a two weeks’ march away, and the region swarms with Parthian patrols. Their only hope for survival is Noreno, a half-Roman soldier, who is entrusted with the impossible mission of crossing the deadly terrain to seek help for his men and turn the tide of the battle.