Hal, a 15-year-old high-school student with a minor yet socially alienating (and painful) disability: he stutters uncontrollably. Determined to work through the problem, Hal opts for an extreme route he joins the school debating team, which sends him on a headfirst plunge into breakneck speech competitions and offers a much-needed boost toward correcting the problem.
The chief spokesperson and lobbyist Nick Naylor is the Vice-President of the Academy of Tobacco Studies. He is talented in speaking and spins argument to defend the cigarette industry in the most difficult situations. His best friends are Polly Bailey that works in the Moderation Council in alcohol business, and Bobby Jay Bliss of the gun business own advisory group SAFETY. They frequently meet each other in a bar and they self-entitle the Mod Squad a.k.a. Merchants of Death, disputing which industry has killed more people. Nick's greatest enemy is Vermont's Senator Ortolan Finistirre, who defends in the Senate the use a skull and crossed bones in the cigarette packs. Nick's son Joey Naylor lives with his mother, and has the chance to know his father in a business trip. When the ambitious reporter Heather Holloway betrays Nick disclosing confidences he had in bed with her, his life turns upside-down. But Nick is good in what he does for the mortgage.
When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife's pain, the man finds a piece of root in the backyard and chops it and varnishes it into the shape of a child. However the woman takes the root as her baby and starts to pretend that it is real.
Don Fabijan is a young priest who comes to serve on an unnamed small island in the Adriatic. In order to help increase birth rate on the island, he decides to pierce condoms before they are sold. He therefore teams up with the newsagent Petar and the pharmacist Marin. After they abolish all forms of birth control on the entire island, the consequences become more and more complicated.
This mosaic-like parable is set in undefined space and time, still its crazy world without ideals filled with violence, cynicism and hopelessness clearly resembles the social atmosphere in Czechoslovakia after August 1968. Three strange loners survive only thanks to their \foolishness\ - a life based on play and philosophy of joy. But the tragic ending of their coexistence is an inevitable outcome of reality that only offers two possibilities: insanity or death.
An insane general starts a process to nuclear holocaust that a war room of politicians and generals frantically try to stop. A classic black and white war satire from director Stanley Kubrick starring Peter Sellers.
Adding a little spice to a waning marriage, Anne and Bob, a wealthy and well-connected American couple, move into a manor house in romantic Paris. While preparing a particularly luxurious dinner for sophisticated international friends, our hostess discovers there are 13 guests. Panic-stricken, Anne insists her loyal maid Maria disguise herself as a mysterious Spanish noble woman to even out the numbers. But a little too much wine and some playful chat lead Maria to accidentally endear herself to a dandy British art broker. Their budding romance will have Anne chasing her maid around Paris and finally plotting to destroy this most unexpected and joyous love affair.
A successful farmyard revolution by the resident animals vs. the farmer goes horribly wrong when corrupt pigs hijack it for their personal gain. Based on the socialist George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm”, a critique of Stalinist authoritarianism.
The Dung Beetle is late, the Parasite is asleep and Mrs Larva is more interested in her knitting than the director’s instructions. It’s clear: this amateur theatre company has a long way to go before they can perform their version of The Insect Play, a famous satirical work from 1922 by the brothers Karel and Josef Čapek which features insects with decidedly human traits: greed, egocentrism, jealousy.
Philosophical movie, staged at the least philosophical environment imaginable: A closed scenery of a nudist spot, where some hired Czech stuff is making a plain erotic movie for a rich Russian producer. Nothing in this movie is what it seems to be at the first superficial glance.
\Prípad pro zacínajícího\ can be classified as a surrealist (or absurdist) satire, and it is based loosely on the third book of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, but the story is transferred to an early 20th-century world in decay. The movie shows also the influence of Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). The satire is aimed at the Czechoslovakian society, and the movie was soon banned after its release in 1970. This also signaled the end of Juráček's career.
After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally murders his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in an Islamic port town in Africa.
Mario and Silvia are a typical Montevidean middle class couple, going through the trauma of retirement. Due to Mario’s oversight in what was to be one of his last operations a small dog dies. Shortly after, Mario and Silvia find that thieves have entered their house. They have no choice but to leave and stay at their daughter’s house, where they will enter a spiral of insecurity and paranoia that will drag them to violence and nonsense.
In the historic Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, despite the cruel war that has been raging since 2014 between the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and the Ukrainian government, people tries to survive in the rotten heart of chaos, where violence disguises itself as peace, propaganda becomes univocal truth and hatred reigns in the name of love.
In her first feature, Věra Chytilová uses a combination of documentary and fiction film techniques to tell two stories in counterpoint. The first follows Olympic champion gymnast Eva Bosáková, who contemplates retirement as she undergoes a gruelling training schedule; the second, a housewife who is unappreciated and ignored by her husband.
A passive mother who dedicates her life to her husband and children. Stuck in daily, repetitive, mundane chores, she has made herself as little as she possibly could. When a magic trick goes wrong at her 4-year-old son's birthday party, an avalanche of coincidental absurdities befalls the family. The magician turns her husband, the authoritarian father, into a chicken. The mother is now forced to come to the fore and take care of the family while moving heaven and earth to bring her husband back. As she tries to survive, she goes through a rough and absurd transformation.
This three-part ballad, which often uses music to stand in for dialogue, remains the most perfect embodiment of Nemec’s vision of a film world independent of reality. Mounting a defense of timid, inhibited, clumsy, and unsuccessful individuals, the three protagonists are a complete antithesis of the industrious heroes of socialist aesthetics. Martyrs of Love cemented Nemec’s reputation as the kind of unrestrained nonconformist the Communist establishment considered the most dangerous to their ideology.
A satirical take on a battle against government & its employees who are unwilling to work for the betterment & welfare of society. From the panchayat to the employees in electricity department are all reluctant to work for the revolution in the village by sticking to the superstitions of the villagers.
Angel of mercy… or murderous “Doctor Death”? Jack Kervorkian is one of the most polarizing figures in modern American history, a man whose passionate belief that people have the right to die has brought him both praise and vilification. Oscar®- and Emmy®-winning actor Al Pacino brings “Dr. Death” to life in an all-new HBO Films presentation: You Don’t Know Jack, directed by Oscar®-winner Barry Levinson.
Strip Search follows several parallel stories examining personal freedoms vs. national security in the aftermath of 9/11; two main subplots involve an American woman detained in China and an Arab man detained in New York City.
\The Laramie Project\ is set in and around Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of the murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard. To create the stage version of \The Laramie Project,\ the eight-member New York-based Tectonic Theatre Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, recording hours of interviews with the town's citizens over a two-year period. The film adaptation dramatizes the troupe's visit, using the actual words from the transcripts to create a portrait of a town forced to confront itself.
Aileen Wuornos is an emotionally scarred highway hooker who shoots a sadistic trick who rapes her and ultimately becomes America's first female serial killer. The film, based on a true story, centers more on the surrounding circumstances than on the murders.
Inspired by true events, this film takes place in Rwanda in the 1990s when more than a million Tutsis were killed in a genocide that went mostly unnoticed by the rest of the world. Hotel owner Paul Rusesabagina houses over a thousand refuges in his hotel in attempt to save their lives.
A law firm brings in its \fixer\ to remedy the situation after a lawyer has a breakdown while representing a chemical company that he knows is guilty in a multi-billion dollar class action suit.
Based on the play of the same name by Pulitzer Prize Winner Cormac McCarthy, this searing two-character drama mixes humor and pathos while examining the relationship between strangers who are brought together by desperate circumstances. Set in a New York tenement apartment, the story focuses on two very different men - a deeply religious black ex-con who thwarts the suicide attempt of an asocial white college professor who tried to throw himself in front of an oncoming subway train, 'The Sunset Limited.' As the one attempts to connect on a rational, spiritual and emotional level, the other remains steadfast in his hard-earned despair. Locked in a philosophical debate, both passionately defend their personal credos and try to convert the other.
