Fernando Meirelles' City of God is a sweeping tale of how crime affects the poor population of Rio de Janeiro. Though the narrative skips around in time, the main focus is on Cabeleira who formed a gang called the Tender Trio. He and his best friend, Bené (Phelipe Haagensen), become crime lords over the course of a decade. When Bené is killed ...
Veteran director Jose Luis Cuerda delivered this sensitive portrait of a child coming of age during a tense political situation just before the Spanish Civil War. On his first day of school, frail eight-year-old Moncho (Manuel Lozano) is so terrified by the imposing figure of his teacher Don Gregorio (Fernando Fernan Gomez) that he flees into the ...
One-time movie song-and-dance man James Dunn won an Academy Award for his "comeback" performance in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Based on the best-selling novel by Betty Smith, the film relates the trials and tribulations of a turn-of-the-century Brooklyn tenement family. The father, Dunn, is a likable but irresponsible alcoholic whose dreams of ...
Director Hugh Hudson, who made his directorial debut with the award-winning Chariots Of Fire, returns to the theme of British life in the 1920s in the bittersweet family drama My Life So Far. Gamma Macintosh (Rosemary Harris) is the matriarch of a family that inhabits Harewood House, a castle in the Scottish Highlands. Besides Gamma, the adult ...
Based on John Grisham's semi-autobiographical novel (which he regarded as his favorite because it "contains no lawyers"), A Painted House is set in the rural community of Oak Park, AR, in 1952. The story is told through the eyes of ten-year-old Luke Chandler (Logan Lerman), who lives and works on a rundown cotton farm with his parents (Robert Sean ...
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir by Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes is an alternately funny and heartbreaking look at growing up in Ireland. Born in Brooklyn, NY, young Frank (Joe Breen) moves at an early age to Limerick, Ireland, with his parents Angela (Emily Watson) and Malachy (Robert Carlyle), who have been unable to support their ...
Louisa May Alcott's classic novel about a family of women in Civil War-era New England is again brought to the screen in this adaptation. The focus is on the March sisters, four young girls raised by their mother (Susan Sarandon) after their father leaves for battle as part of the Union Army. At the center is Jo March (Winona Ryder), an ...
Lucy Maud Montgomery's novel Anne of Green Gables, previously filmed in 1934, was afforded a TV-movie treatment in 1985. Megan Follows stars as 13-year-old Anne Shirley, an orphan girl sent to live with a foster family on Canada's Prince Edward Island. Though she has great difficulty controlling her temper, impulsiveness and vivid imagination, ...
As the summer sun shines down on England in the early 1980s, two boys who couldn't be more different are brought together by a mutual love of cinema and a desire to emulate their favorite action movie icon. Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a well-mannered schoolboy being raised in an ultra-religious community that deplores such corruptive ...
David Copperfield was MGM's major Christmas release for its 1934-1935 season and also the first of producer David O. Selznick's major "literary" films for that studio. While a great deal of editing and streamlining was necessary to distill Charles Dickens' massive novel into 133 minutes of screen time, the end result was so successful that only ...
The directing debut of actor Cameron Watson, Our Very Own chronicles the daily hopes and dreams of high schoolers and their parents in a small Tennessee town, circa 1978. Shelbyville is the real-life birthplace not only of Watson, who wrote the script from his own recollections, but also of actress Sondra Locke -- or as the townspeople know her, ...
In this drama from Ireland, a man looks back at his youth in the 1950s, when he grew into manhood in the wake of the War of Independence. Jimmy (Darren McHugh) and his best friend Willie (Joe Jeffers) are fairly typical teenagers who like rock and roll, comic books, and Mary (Joy Florish), a girl they've known since childhood. But while their ...
Hungarian director Andor Szilagyi received a much-coveted Crystal Globe nomination at the Karlovy-Vary Film Festival for directing this period drama. The film unfolds in WWII-era Budapest, Hungary (in the fall of 1944) and follows the plight of a Jewish clan, the Halasz family, as they hide from the Nazis and struggle to evade capture. Throughout ...
Of the many film versions of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, this 1949 MGM adaptation is by far the prettiest. Set in New England during the Civil War, the film relates the various adventures of the March sisters: Jo (June Allyson), Beth (Margaret O'Brien), Amy (Elizabeth Taylor) and Meg (Janet Leigh). Jo emerges as the main character, as she ...
Set in 1950, this is a convincing, well-acted drama about a young girl's growing up in Las Vegas amidst poverty and a turbulent home life. The 13-year-old Rose (Annabeth Gish) lives with her mother (JoBeth Williams), stepfather (Jon Voight), and two sisters in a working-class home. Trouble is brewing on several fronts: her stepfather is his usual ...
Actor and author Richard E. Grant made his directorial debut with this period comedy drama inspired by his own experiences growing up in colonial Africa in the sixties. Ralph Compton (Zachary Fox) is the 11-year old son of Harry (Gabriel Byrne), the minister of education in the British-controlled African nation of Swaziland. While Harry is a ...
Based on a novel by William H. Armstrong, the made-for-TV Sounder was a remake of director Gordon Parks' 1972 theatrical feature of the same name. This is the story of 11-year-old black youngster David Daniel Lee Robertson III, known throughout the film as "Boy." When his sharecropper father is arrested and sentenced to five years at hard labor ...
A gifted teenager is thrown for a loop when her parents' marriage falls apart in this coming-of-age drama set in the early '70s. Alex Markov (Angela Gots) is a 16-year-old who dreams of a career as a professional dancer; unlike many girls with similar goals, Alex is blessed with supportive parents, Dan (Robert Hayes) and Clarice (Ellen Greene), ...
A young man who only wants to dance finds that isn't so simple when you're an Iranian in America in this independent drama. Houshang (Mansour) isn't much different than a lot of teenagers living in Southern California in 1979; he likes disco, thought Saturday Night Fever was a great movie, and wants to be able to take over the dance floor just ...
Long but rewarding, the Danish-Swedish Pelle the Conqueror is based on the early passages of Martin Andersen Nexoe's four-volume novel. Pelle (Pelle Hvengaard) is the son of a 19th-century Swedish farmer (Max Von Sydow). Seeking escape from their poverty-stricken surroundings, father and son emigrate to Denmark. Upon arrival, however, they are ...
Good Neighbors co-stars Felicity Kendal and Paul Eddington reunite for director Ken Taylor's adaptation of Mary Wesley's popular novel concerning the innocent summer before war changed everything, and the relationship shared by five cousins as they gather to pay tribute to their deceased uncle years later. As the warm breeze of August blows in the ...
An affectionate portrait of a family whose members are behaving at their worst. The story of There Was No War in '72 begins from the point of view of Yoni (Adam Abulafia), the beleaguered son of an overbearing businessman (Shmuel Edelman). To the intense disappointment of his father, Yoni has just been kicked out of his private school for poor ...
NASA engineer Homer H. Hickam, Jr.'s autobiography provided the basis for this drama about a teenager coming of age at the dawn of the space race. In 1957, Homer Hickam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a high school student in Coalwood, West Virginia when the Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. While most of his friends and neighbors ...
Based on the novel by Carol Ryrie Brink, this film is the story of a young tomboy growing up in Wisconsin in the late 19th century. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide
An unruly collection of clever but crass Thatcher-era English high-school students seek to earn the scores needed to enroll in Oxford and Cambridge in director Nicholas Hytner and screenwriter Alan Bennett's screen adaptation of Bennett's Tony-winning play. The History Boys focuses on a group of eight students, all of them deemed by their ...
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