One day Pavel, a young man wounded in the war, suddenly shows up at the home of a Moscow scientist name Krymov and claims to be his illegitimate son. Krymov denies this, but out of compassion he helps arrange a necessary operation for Pavel. Then certain things begin happening which suggest to Krymov that he may have a psychologically unstable fellow on his hands.
Tag: 2000s
After serving time in prison, Sonny returns to his coastal Florida hometown, where life and the residents haven’t changed much, including the local crime boss, Vance, who owes Sonny some money. When Sonny goes to collect, he gets beaten up, then his house is blown up and his father is killed. Sonny, while seeking revenge against Vance and his crime gang, moves into the home of his old friend Dave, the local sheriff, and his nurse wife Ann, and their two children. Soon, a romance forms between the grieving Sonny and Ann.
Ruben is a lone and unbalanced young man who lost his sight in childhood. Marie is an albino woman of temperate look and with a lot of insecurities. She has a beautiful voice and along with Ruben shares a mutual love for books and tales. Ruben’s mother hires her as a reader to read her son books orally. While they live in a mansion, between these two lonely souls sparks love, but will love still be blind if the man recovers from his blindness?
John Wilson’s student film from his days at SUNY Binghamton, an important pivot away from his earlier juvenilia of self-made parodies and inquisitive pranks. In this loosely journalistic, genuinely receptive, no-frills portrait of balloon fetishists, we sense the filmmaker first discovering and cherishing what he would later describe as “that moment you try to stop giggling and get serious.”
Award-winning director Jia Zhangke’s documentary Useless weaves a three-part tale about the Chinese clothing industry. The documentary opens in the textile factories of Guangdong, where workers hunch over massive machines day in day out for low pay, before moving to Paris where fashion designer Ma Ke is unveiling her new collection of organic, avant-garde, haute couture designs. Running counter to the clothing industry’s culture of mass production and reproduction, her new line “Wu Yong”, meaning “Useless”, lends the film its title, and forms the heart of the documentary. The third act of the film travels to a tailor shop in a dusty mining town in Shanxi. Using a down-to-earth montage of people and places, Useless brings out the significance of clothing, and the different faces and sectors of modern China.
Kaoru, a wealthy woman whose youth is fading, abandons the hustle and bustle of the city to live a peaceful life in a house on the coast. There she takes care of an old deaf, dumb and blind man as if he were an insect, a child or a pet. He can’t do anything for himself, so she feeds him and accompanies him on his walks. This strong mutual dependency offers Kaoru an escape from society and allows her to free herself from restrictions imposed by common sense.
Virgil Bliss is a man obsessed with living a normal life, finding a good job, marrying a decent woman and building a family of his own. The only problem is that he is a recently paroled career thief. After his release from prison after nearly a decade he meets Manny Alvarez who takes naive Virgil under his wing and initiates him in the ways of the world. He introduces him to Ruby, a junkie prostitute, with whom Virgil immediately falls in love. Together they form a kind of damaged family, dogged by mistrust, chemical dependency and the weight of their wasted lives. Everything gets even shakier when the psychotic Manny reappears.
Eleven-year-old petty teen criminal Maroa lives with her violent grandmother Brígida in Caracas. After her boyfriend Carlos is involved in a shooting, Maroa is arrested and sent to a school where Joaquín conducts the youth orchestra, which he asks the naturally talented Maroa to join. Joaquín is immediately interested in the talented young girl who lacks all notion of discipline; as he becomes the only person to offer her hope in the midst of her rejection, he realizes that through Maroa his own world has also changed forever.