Browse Movies : Completed : 2023 : Drama : T (Page #4)

A choir of creatures introduces a world delicately constructed by fantasy, mystery, and magical realism in Francisca Alegría’s poignant and stunning debut feature. It begins in a river in the south of Chile where fish are dying due to pollution from a nearby factory. Amid their floating bodies, long-deceased Magdalena (Mia Maestro) bubbles up to the surface gasping for air, bringing with her old wounds and a wave of family secrets. This shocking return sends her widowed husband into turmoil and prompts their daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela) to return home to the family’s dairy farm with her own children. Magdalena’s presence reverberates among her family, instigating fits of laughter and despair in equal measure with all but Cecilia’s eldest child, who finds much-needed comfort in their grandmother’s love and unconditional understanding during a time of transition.

Aware that her time is running short, irascible Wu family matriarch Lily (Lisa Lu) is eager to repair the strained relationship with her adult daughter Mary (Michelle Krusiec) and help her shy 18-year-old granddaughter Emma (Rochelle Ying) find her voice. As her final wish, she persuades longtime friend Charlotte (Joely Fisher), Emma and Emma’s best friend Karen (Tiffany Wu) to spring her from her L.A. nursing home and take a wild road trip up the California coast to a special place from her past. Along the way, long-held secrets are revealed and Mary and Emma each come to understand the painful choices their mothers made in this funny and touching multi-generational story about family, forgiveness and being true to oneself.

The Starling Girl follows seventeen-year-old Jem Starling (Scanlen), who struggles to define her place within her fundamentalist Christian community in rural Kentucky. Even her greatest joy — the church dance group — is tempered by worry that her love of dance is actually sinful, and she’s caught between a burgeoning awareness of her own sexuality and an instinctive resistance to her mom’s urging that the time has come to begin courting. She finds respite from her confusion in the encouragement of her youth pastor Owen (Pullman), who is likewise drawn to the blossoming Jem’s attention.

Following a young boy (Tori) and a teenage girl (Lokita) who have left their home countries of Cameroon and Benin to make a new life in Belgium, we follow their journey as they navigate a range of difficult experiences. Whether it be finding jobs on the black market or working to send money back to their families, their friendship provides an unbreakable bond that helps them survive. Hoping to get their papers to remain in the country, they soon find that there are an array of forces stacked against them. They must fight for their friendship and their lives as their world begins to crumble. Clinging to the hope of a better life, their struggle is a gripping testament to the power of the human spirit and to the courage of their relationship.

Ralph Fiennes’s exquisite performance of T. S. Eliot's poetic masterpiece is dynamically translated from stage to screen by director Sophie Fiennes (Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology). During the early days of COVID, the Oscar® nominee set himself the challenge of committing Four Quartets to memory, and in 2021 he brought it to the London stage followed by a tour of theaters across the UK. Written by Nobel Prize winner Eliot in the shadow of the Second World War, the poem is a searching examination of who – and what – we are. This celebrated meditation on human experience, time, and the divine offers up questions, imagery, and emotions that bear a powerful relevance to our present day.

Eight-year-old Vicky has an unusual gift: she can recreate any scent she comes across, even that of her beloved mother Joanne. When her estranged aunt suddenly returns to town, the invocation of her fragrance plunges the young girl back in time to unravel a mysterious and fiery past. The wildly imaginative breakout from filmmaker Léa Mysius, this supernatural fable is replete with family secrets and queer romance.

Rural Ireland. 1981. Nine-year-old Cait is sent away from her overcrowded, dysfunctional family to live with foster parents for the summer. Quietly struggling at school and at home, she has learned to hide in plain sight from those around her. She blossoms in their care, but in this house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers one painful truth.

Set in the suburbs of Boulogne-Sur-Mer in northern France, The Worst Ones captures a film within a film as it follows the production of a feature whose director turns to the local Cité Picasso housing project for casting.

After a Jewish couple (Jérémie Renier and The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo) sells their basement to a former history teacher (The Intouchables’ François Cluzet), they discover his secret life as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. As the couple struggles to rescind the sale, the buyer befriends their naive teenage daughter.