Bear Cub (Cachorro), directed by Luis Miguel Albaladejo, is about the life of Bernardo (played by David Castillo), whose libertine mother Violeta (Elvira Lindo) decides to go on a two-week tour of India with her second husband.  Before leaving, she assigns nine-year-old Bernardo to the care of her brother, Pedro (played by José Luis García-Pérez), […]

Bad Education (La Mala educación), directed by Pedro Almodóvar and based on a short story that he wrote in the early 1970s, explores the limits of love and sexual passion. The film begins, captioned 1980, with a gratuitous scene, presumably calculated to scare straights out of the audience so that gays and their friends will

The Azerbaijan homeland stretches from an area in the Caucasus into present-day Iran; the principal city, Baku, is an oil-rich metropolis on the Caspian Sea that is featured in Broken Bridges, directed by Rafigh Pooya. Azerbaijan was integrated into Imperial Russia in 1828.  When the Russian revolution began in 1917, Azerbaijan set up an independent state,

Brother to Brother, directed and written by Rodney Evans, is a biopic dedicated to the memory of Harlem Renaissance painter and poet Richard Bruce Nugent (played by Roger Robinson), who was born in 1906; his literary pseudonym was Richard Bruce. One day in 1987, a young African American painter, Perry Williams (played by Anthony Mackie)

Callas Forever is a fictional account of what might have been the last days of the life of Maria Callas, who died of a heart attack in 1977 at the age of fifty-three. When the film begins, Larry Kelly (played by Jeremy Irons), an entirely fictional concert promoter with a pony tail and a desire for a

In 1998, a scandal broke involving the Los Angeles Police Department. Earlier in the 1990s, some three dozen members of an anti-gang police task force in the Rampart Division, a unit located halfway between downtown and Hollywood, were revealed to have interrogated and brutalized residents without probable cause and then fabricated evidence to wrongfully convict

In 1998, a scandal broke involving the Los Angeles Police Department. Earlier in the 1990s, some three dozen members of an anti-gang police task force in the Rampart Division, a unit located halfway between downtown and Hollywood, were revealed to have interrogated and brutalized residents without probable cause and then fabricated evidence to wrongfully convict

  When Les choristes (known in English under the title The Choir) begins, an elderly Pierre Moranghe (played by Jacques Perrin) greets his onetime classmate Pépinot (played by Maxence Perrin), who has a notebook in his hand; the year is 1999. The notebook consists of a journal kept by their former teacher, Clémont Mathieu (played by Gérard Jugnot).

Head in the Clouds, directed by John Duigan, deals with the fate of a love triangle during a time of war in which politics ultimately trumps sex. Soon after the film begins, Cambridge University student Guy (played by Stuart Townsend) unexpectedly meets fellow student Gilda Bessé (played by Charlize Theron). Gilda, a student who has

Chelsea, Clinton’s daughter, attended Stanford University so that she could study far from Washington, though of course she would be watched by the Secret Service. Her situation evidently inspires First Daughter, directed and voicedover by Forest Whitaker, who updates the plight of a daughter of the president to 2004, when the likelihood of a terrorist attack