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On Christmas Eve in the Spanish quarter of L.A. police try to arrest a couple running a shady floor show. Hiding in a church, the girl finds an abandoned baby and uses it as cover to escape capture. Thus she finds herself with a baby she is becoming ever more fond of, a helpful doctor himself too fond of the bottle, and a husband who has disappeared. Dare she try and change her ways and keep the child?
A family in rural Taiwan starts to break up when the son’s young wife dies giving birth to her second child. The son Kun-Cheng leaves home and drifts into another sexual relationship, but tries to be a good father to his kids and a tolerant, filial son to his parents, both of whom irritate the hell out of him.
The movie follows the lives of a woman and a man starting from several generations earlier. The story spans a whole century and several continents.
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The Man Who Envied Women wryly chronicles the aftermath of a breakup between a philandering professor, played by two different actors, and his artist wife, voiced by choreographer Trisha Brown, who serves as the largely unseen narrator. Yet the work’s concerns radiate far beyond the couple, expanding to include film history and on-the-ground politics alike—punctuating the piece are a variety of cinematic quotations, from Hollis Frampton to Barbara Stanwyck, as well as documentary footage of spirited exchanges about American imperialism in Latin America and the housing crisis in New York.
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Yvonne Rainer’s landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger.
Centred around a former tennis champ who swings with the girls and volleying straight sets with the rich and famous while set on owning his own tennis court.
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At age 42, Rafael Belvedere is having a crisis. He lives in the shadow of his father, he feels guilty about rarely visiting his aging mother, his ex-wife says he doesn’t spend enough time with their daughter and he has yet to make a commitment to his girlfriend. At his lowest point, a minor heart attack reunites him with Juan Carlos, a childhood friend, who helps Rafael to reconstruct his past and look at the present in new ways.
Athos Magnani, a young researcher, returns to Tara, where his father was killed before his birth, at the request of Draifa. The father, also named Athos Magnani and looking exactly like the son, was killed by a fascist in 1936 — or so says Draifa (his mistress), the town statue, and everyone in town. As the son untangles the web of lies this story is constructed from, he finds himself ensnared in the same web.
