Showing posts with label European. Show all posts
Showing posts with label European. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Hamnet

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William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is sent to a family to tutor some children in Latin as a form of payment for his father’s debts. There he also meets the two elder half-siblings Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) and Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley). Agnes is the subject of malicious rumors in town denouncing her as a forest witch. However, it is love at first sight when William sets his eyes on her and soon she is pregnant with their soon to be firstborn. The two decide to get married despite his mother Mary’s (Emily Watson) reluctance to give her blessing. Their eldest daughter Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breatnach) grows up healthy but when Agnes gives birth to twins Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) later on, she is hounded by her vision of seeing only two children at William's deathbed, prompting her to believe that one of the three children will die young. As the bubonic plague sweeps across England, Agnes’ greatest fear comes true.

Monday, February 2, 2026

In die Sonne schauen

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A large family lived on a rural farm in the early 1900’s. One of the younger children, Alma (Hanna Heckt) witnesses various misfortunes such as death, her older brother Fritz (Filip Schnack) being forced to lose a leg to avoid joining the military, as well as the tragedy of her other siblings. In the 1940’s, her sisters Erika (Lea Drinda) and Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading) are adolescents at the same farm, with a much older Fritz (Martin Rother) being the object of Erika’s teenage curiosities. Flash forward to the 1980’s and Irm is the only one left living at the farm along with her daughter Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) who navigates weird sexual dynamics with her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann). Angelika ends up disappearing but her daughter Christa (Luise Heyer) returns to the farm in the 2020’s along with her husband and two daughters.

Saturday, January 31, 2026

Affeksjonsverdi

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Two sisters survive childhood trauma and navigate adulthood through different means. Nora (Renate Reinsve) ends up a bit neurotic, a locally renowned theater actress having an affair with one of her married co-actors. Her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) is a historian and raising a small family of her own with her husband and son. Whatever stability they currently have in life is at risk of being upended when their estranged father, celebrated film director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), comes back to Norway trying to make amends. He hands Nora a script he wrote for a comeback film and he wants to cast her in the lead role. Unfortunately, she doesn’t want to work with him, which leads him to court popular American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) for the role. To make matters more complicated, they are planning to film at the family home where Nora and Agnes grew up.

Monday, September 15, 2025

Magellan

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Portuguese explorer Fernão de Magalhães (Gael García Bernal) is stuck in Melaka with conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque (Roger Alan Koza) but sets his sights on his dream islands of gold. Before heading back home to Lisbon, he purchases local Enrique de Malaca (Amado Arjay Babon) as slave and interpreter for his return journey to Asia. Back in Lisbon he meets his wife Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo) who eventually bears him a son, neither of whom he will meet again when he finally sets sail. Using his knowledge of the location of the spice islands of Moluccas, he manages to convince the monarch of Castille to fund his trip after he falls out of favor with Manuel I of Portugal. The voyage is not without challenges but they finally dock on the island of Limasawa in the Visayas in 1521. There they befriend the locals and convert them to Christianity, but Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro) has a different idea.

Monday, September 1, 2025

The Roses

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Architect Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and chef Ivy (Olivia Colman) first meet as disgruntled employees whose potential for greatness is curtailed by their respective bosses. 10 years later, the Roses are married and have relocated to California where he is busy with his career and she is doing a great job raising their two children. A reversal of fortune occurs when a freak storm serves as a career ending challenge for him after a museum he constructed collapses. The resulting spliced viral video ensures that nobody in the world of architecture will take him seriously ever again. Meanwhile, the same storm strands a reputable food critic at her shabby restaurant which turns her and her cuisine into an overnight sensation. As her career prospers and she becomes the provider of the family, he nurses his bruised ego by being a stay-at-home dad. The dynamics in the household change and the married couple begin to despise one another.

Saturday, March 8, 2025

The Brutalist

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Bauhaus-trained architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) flees his native Hungary and ends up in Bremerhaven where he boards a ship that brings him to America. His wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and young niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are left behind. Docking in New York, László makes it his primary life goal to be reunited with them in America, but the American dream is proving hard to attain. He gets help from his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) who has immigrated way before him and has now fully assimilated to the American way of life. The two are contracted by twin siblings Harry (Joe Alwyn) and Maggie (Stacy Martin) to convert a room in their father’s estate into a library as a surprise gift for his birthday. When the wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) walks in on them in the middle of renovation, he gets mad and fires them on the spot. Later on, he traces László’s whereabouts after he discovers the latter’s reputation in the world of architecture. A partnership begins and lives are changed, for the better and for the worse.

Thursday, February 20, 2025

The Room Next Door

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Veteran war correspondent Martha is diagnosed with stage three cervical cancer and is now spending most of her time at the hospital to undergo chemotherapy and other experimental treatments. Ingrid is a best-selling author holding a book signing event for her latest book when a friend of hers informs her about Martha’s condition as well as the address of the hospital she is staying in. Martha and Ingrid used to work for the same magazine years ago but haven’t been in touch for a while. Ingrid interprets this as a sign to reconnect, and so she pays her old colleague a visit. What starts off as a simple effort to revive their friendship turns into something more serious when Martha’s cancer treatments start to fail, leading her to decide on a drastic action that will require Ingrid’s help. Is Ingrid capable of overcoming her fear of death to grant Martha’s dying wish?

Thursday, January 30, 2025

A Real Pain

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Jewish American cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benjamin (Kieran Culkin) put the small inheritance they receive from their recently deceased grandma to good use, so they travel to Poland and get to know the family’s roots. There they meet British tour leader James (Will Sharpe) who is not Jewish himself but has studied Eastern European history extensively. Joined by four other participants, they all embark on a tour of Warsaw before heading over to Lublin to visit the Nazi concentration camp in Majdanek. Benji causes friction within the group due to his unapologetically blunt behavior and unorthodox opinions, leading Dave to be embarrassed of him in front of the other guests. After he expounds on what is causing his cousin’s unhinged attitude towards the tour and life in general, he reminisces on their childhood together and tries to help him get over his depression, but most often than not it is impossible to help people who won’t help themselves.

Thursday, January 9, 2025

The Substance

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Now in her 50’s, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has been the face of her long-time TV aerobics program, not to mention she has just received a star at Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Despite all her achievements, her age becomes a crucial factor as TV exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) decides to fire her so he can hire somebody to cater to a much younger audience. After a car accident that sends her to the ER, Elisabeth receives an anonymous business card with a number that she reluctantly dials after a while. The offer from the other end of the line is a new wonder drug called The Substance, made available to her in locker 503 housed in a white walled cube of a room in a decrepit building. Once she follows all instructions and administers the serum on herself, a younger version of herself literally emerges from her back, who later calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley). The catch? They are one and must regularly switch every seven days, or else…

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Maria

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September 16, 1977. Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) dies of a heart attack at 53 in her Paris apartment. Flashback a few weeks earlier, Maria intentionally annoys her loyal butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) by asking him to move the piano to a different room every day while she sings to her housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) who always tells her that she is magnificent after each impromptu performance. The truth of the matter is that the opera legend has lost her singing voice, which sets her plans in motion to recover it not so she could go back to performing for an audience but rather so she could perform for herself. Her consumption of prescription drug Mandrax results in hallucinations conjuring a young filmmaker also named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who is supposedly filming a documentary about her life. As she struggles with the memories of her glory days, she comes to terms with her life as La Divina accompanied by bittersweet experiences such as her relationship with a Greek magnate who dumped her for Jackie Kennedy.

Friday, November 15, 2024

Emilia Pérez

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Born in the Dominican Republic and moving to Mexico for university studies where she eventually ends up as a lawyer, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) laments how her latest case turns out, being ruled as a suicide despite clearly being a
murder after the key witness refuses to testify. On her way out of the courtroom she receives a lucrative offer via an anonymous phone call asking her to wait in front of a newsstand, which she obediently does before being kidnapped by two armed men. In an armored van she comes face to face with Juan “Manitas” del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), a notorious drug lord who promises her 2 million if she helps him fake his death so he can fully transition into a woman and live a peaceful life, flashing her his breasts as a sign that she already began hormone therapy. Doing what she is told, Rita gets his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and his two sons to Lausanne as a safe haven before carrying out the rest of the plan. Four years later, Rita meets enigmatic philanthropist Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) at a party in London, realizing that her past has finally come back to haunt her.

Monday, November 11, 2024

We Live in Time

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Tobias Durand (Andrew Garfield) works as a representative for breakfast cereal Weetabix and is about to sign his divorce papers when his pen runs out of ink mid-signing. He heads to a convenience store in his bathrobe to purchase four pens and a box of cookies, dropping one on the way back, leaning over to pick it up, and getting run over by a car in the process. Former figure skater turned chef Almut Brühl (Florence Pugh) takes him to the hospital and apologizes for the mishap, offering a free dinner at the restaurant where she works, for him and his wife. After disclosing the truth about his divorce, the two hit it off, end up in a relationship, and eventually welcome a daughter. Everything seems happy until she is diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer and given several options for treatment, none of which, unfortunately, guaranteeing a positive outcome.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Poor Things

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What’s supposed to be the end of a life becomes the beginning of a new one after a failed suicide attempt, albeit with some mental degradation involved that requires relearning the basics. Now known as Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), she becomes the experiment of renowned surgeon Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe) who tries to treat her as a mere science project yet can’t distance himself enough emotionally to not serve as her new father figure. He enlists the help of his best medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to chart her progress and is eventually designated as her fiancé after witnessing their fondness for one another. Due to the unique and delicate condition of his ward, God employs promiscuous lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) to draft a special nuptial contract. Out of curiosity, he goes out of his way to get to know the subject of the document and is immediately smitten by her, taking advantage of her naivety and convincing her to run away with him to Portugal, which serves as her first stop in discovering the world and, in effect, rediscovering life itself.

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Anatomie d'une chute

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German novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is being interviewed by a student in her Grenoble home when Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), her husband, begins playing disruptively loud music from their attic that effectively cuts the interview short. Their blind son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) goes out for a walk with his Border Collie and later finds his father’s dead body on the snow when he comes back. As mother and son call an ambulance for what seems to be an accidental fall, the police enter the picture and an investigation begins with Sandra as the main suspect. As the prosecution presents evidence after evidence that what occurred might have been premeditated murder, the couple’s marriage and dirty laundry are displayed for an entire jury to dissect. Did he kill himself? Did she? Or was it an accident? Those are the questions, but the answers are simply too hard to come by.

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Saltburn

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Socially-awkward Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) gets into Oxford on a scholarship and immediately feels out of place in a crowd of privileged peers. He is quickly smitten with co-freshmen Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), towards whom the entire college appears to gravitate. He falls into his orbit through a random act of kindness and next thing he knows, they are suddenly operating within the same social circle. Receiving news of his father’s passing, Oliver is consoled by his newfound friend and invited to their massive estate called Saltburn to unwind for the summer. There Oliver meets Felix’s eccentric family: his father Sir James (Richard E. Grant); his mother Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike); his “sexually incontinent” sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) as well as his poor American cousin Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe) who constantly bullies him. Amused and bemused by the barrage of opulence, Oliver starts to charm his way into the family dynamics, but can he really force his way into a world where he obviously does not belong?

Friday, July 21, 2023

Oppenheimer

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1926. A young J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) studies Physics at Cambridge and almost poisons his professor through an apple. After an academic detour at Göttingen, he returns to the United States to spearhead a Quantum Physics program in California. He marries biologist Katherine Puening (Emily Blunt) but it doesn’t take long for him to start an extramarital affair with US Communist Party member Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), whom he loses to suicide later on. He acknowledges the potential for nuclear fission to be weaponized as it was discovered in the late 1930’s and is eventually recruited by US Army General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to lead the country’s Manhattan Project, which would develop the atomic bomb that would eventually be dropped on two cities in Japan to end the second World War. As his former ally Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a high-ranking member of the US Atomic Energy Commission, testifies against him to salvage his own political career, Oppenheimer reflects on the guilt he feels for honing a weapon that could devastate the world.

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Tár

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EGOT winner Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) has everything she could ask for career-wise, blazing a trail as a renowned conductor and touring various Philharmonic orchestras around the world before settling in Berlin as its chief conductor. She is living with her wife, violinist Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), with whom she is raising a daughter named Petra (Mila Bogojevic). When young Russian cellist Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer) joins the group, feelings and urges that are hard to shake off overwhelm Lydia, which causes grave concern among her orchestra who seem to know about some past misbehavior on her part. The suicide of a young conductor accusing her of intentionally tanking her career after she refuses her sexual advances puts Tár’s career and family life in a standstill. Is she innocent or guilty? If she were, will she commit the same mistakes again? Will she get out of this new challenge unscathed?

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

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Model-influencer couple Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) quarrel over petty issues all the time but this doesn’t mean that they are giving up on capitalizing on their Insta-perfect relationship. Invited to a cruise on a luxury yacht, the two end up rubbing elbows with colorful personalities from the upper echelons of society. The ship’s Captain (Woody Harrelson) is perpetually drunk, with overall management of the yacht’s day-to-day activities falling on head-of-staff Paula’s (Vicki Berlin) shoulders, who does her best to keep the high profile guests satisfied with the help of her army of dedicated personnel, which includes toilet cleaner Abigail (Dolly de Leon). An unexpected disaster shakes up the dynamics of power among the passengers of the ship and immediately becomes a game of survival of the fittest. Will money and status play a vital role when the main predicament of day-to-day life becomes a question of back to basics?

Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Belfast

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Belfast, 1969. Buddy (Jude Hill) is a nine-year-old boy belonging to a Protestant working class family who witnesses the horrors of The Troubles as Catholics are rounded up in the predominantly Protestant province of Ulster in Northern Ireland. Despite the ruckus, he can always count on the support of his family: his Pop (Ciarán Hinds) and Granny (Judi Dench); his brother Will (Lewis McAskie); and his strong-willed Ma (Caitríone Balfe). His Pa (Jamie Dornan), they only see once every two weeks as he works across the sea in London. As the commotions begin to escalate and the street they live in is barricaded as the army is sent in to maintain peace and order, the family will be forced to face the music of the current socio-political turmoil. Should they risk it and make it work as a separated family in Belfast or accept the offer of Pa’s company to relocate to and be a whole family again in England?

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Madres paralelas

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Freelance photographer Janis Martínez Moreno (Penélope Cruz) mixes business with pleasure and gets knocked up after an intimate night with her client Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic archaeologist who promises to oversee the excavation of her great grandfather’s mass grave who was killed in the civil war. Nine months later, she is ready to give birth and shares a hospital room with Ana Manso Ferreras (Milena Smit), a teenage mother who is a victim of rape. The two unexpected moms to be give birth at the same time: one with great anticipation; the other with trepidation. As they hold their respective daughters in their arms, feelings begin to change. Trouble ensues when Arturo sees the child for the first time and insinuates that she does not appear to be his. Out of curiosity, Janis conducts a maternity test and gets the shock of her life when the results come back negative.

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