nogginstem's - Favourites List
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The Witch (2015)The VVitch: A New-England Folktale
New England, 1630: William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie) lead a devout Christian life with their five children, homesteading on the edge of an impassable wilderness. When their new-born son mysteriously vanishes and their crops fail, the family begins to turn on one another. 'The Witch' is a chilling portrait of a family unrevelling within their own fears and anxieties, leaving them prey to an inescapable evil. - Director:
- Robert Eggers
- Cast:
- Anya Taylor-Joy, Wahab Chaudhry, Ralph Ineson
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David Fincher's 'The Social Network' is the stunning tale of a new breed of cultural insurgent: a punk genius who sparked a revolution and changed the face of human interaction for a generation, and perhaps forever. Shot through with emotional brutality and unexpected humour, this superbly crafted film chronicles the formation of Facebook and the battles over ownership that followed upon the website's unfathomable success. With a complex, incisive screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and a brilliant cast including Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, 'The Social Network' bears witness to the birth of an idea that rewove the fabric of society even as it unravelled the friendship of its creators. - Director:
- David Fincher
- Cast:
- Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake
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"2001: A Space Odyssey" is a countdown to tomorrow, a road map to human destiny, a quest for the infinite. It is a dazzling, Academy Award-winning visual achievement, a compelling drama of man vs. machine, a stunning meld of music and motion. It may be the masterwork of director Stanley Kubrick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke) and it will likely excite, inspire and enthrall for generations. To begin his voyage into the future, Kubrick visits our prehistoric ape-ancestry past, then leaps millennia (via one of the most mind-blowing jump cuts ever conceived) into colonized space, and ultimately whisks astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea) into uncharted realms of space, perhaps even into immortality. - Director:
- Stanley Kubrick
- Cast:
- Keir Dullea, Douglas Rain, Gary Lockwood
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Love Exposure (2008)Ai no mukidashi
Having grown up in a devout Christian family, Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) has always been a well-behaved kid. After his mother dies, his priest father is seduced by a woman who breaks his heart, causing him to torment Yu by forcing him to confess his sins on a daily basis. Of course, being a fairly normal kid, Yu has no legitimate sins to confess. To appease his increasingly demanding father, Yu is determined to become a true sinner, eventually training to become an expert at sneak upskirt photography. Pornography being the one sin no priest can overlook, Yu gets the attention he's been so desperately seeking from his dad. One day while hanging out with his fellow sinner pals - but dressed like Sasori as punishment for being on the losing end of a bet - Yu meets a beautiful girl named Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima). Their first meeting is a glorious one, beginning with an all-out street brawl and ending with a kiss. There are only two problems: she thinks he's a woman and a devious cult leader named Aya (Sakura Ando) is carefully manipulating both of their lives. - Director:
- Sion Sono
- Cast:
- Takahiro Nishijima, Hikari Mitsushima, Sakura Andô
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Persona (1966)Kinematografi
Bergman's masterpiece of self-doubt, identity and eroticism is an audacious example of cinematic art. The notional story centres on newly mute actor Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) recuperating at her coastal holiday home in the care of a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). As tensions between the pair grow, their very selves seem to blur, chronology becomes uncertain and what is real and unreal loses significance. Yet the true impact of Persona goes beyond mere storytelling, touching, as Bergman said, 'wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover'. - Director:
- Ingmar Bergman
- Cast:
- Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook
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Six or eight or twelve years after the Civil War, a stagecoach hurtles through the wintry Wyoming landscape. The passengers, bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and his fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), race towards the town of Red Rock where Ruth, known in these parts as "The Hangman", will bring Domergue to justice. Along the road, they encounter two strangers: Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a black former union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter, and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), a southern renegade who claims to be the town's new Sheriff. Losing their lead on the blizzard, Ruth, Domergue, Warren and Mannix seek refuge at Minnie's Haberdashery, a stagecoach stopover on a mountain pass. When they arrive at Minnie's, they are greeted not by the proprietor but by four unfamiliar faces. Bob (Demian Bichir), who's taking care of Minnie's while she's visiting her mother, is holed up with Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), the hangman of Red Rock, cow-puncher Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern). As the storm overtakes the mountainside stopover, our eight travelers come to learn they may not make it to Red Rock after all… - Director:
- Quentin Tarantino
- Cast:
- Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh
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Exhilarating and astonishingly ambitious, "Victoria" is an adrenaline-fuelled heist thriller set on the streets of nighttime Berlin that features the staggering technical feat of being shot in a single, unbroken take. Victoria, a young woman from Madrid, meets four local guys outside a nightclub in the early hours of the morning. Sonne and his friends are Berliners who promise to show her the real side of the city. But when the group are suddenly forced to repay a debt to a member of the city's criminal underworld, the night quickly spirals out of control. - Director:
- Sebastian Schipper
- Cast:
- Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski
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Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) has entered a particularly dark phase in her life: her father, a famous artist whose affairs she managed, has recently died, and she's been dumped by her boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley). Needing a fresh location to relax and regroup, Catherine heads to her friend Virginia's (Katherine Waterston) lake house for some much needed rest. However, once Catherine arrives, relaxation proves impossible to find, as she is overcome with memories of time spent at the same house with James the year before. As cracks in the relationship between the two women begin to appear, Catherine soon starts descending into a downward spiral of delusion and madness. - Director:
- Alex Ross Perry
- Cast:
- Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston, Patrick Fugit
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Son of Saul (2015)Saul Fia
Saul Auslander (Géza Röhrig) is a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners forced to assist in the machinery of the Nazi concentration camps. While at work, he discovers the body of a boy he recognises as his son. As the Sonderkommando plan a rebellion, Saul vows to carry out an impossible task: to save the child's body from the flames and to find a rabbi to offer the boy a proper burial. - Director:
- László Nemes
- Cast:
- Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn
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A psychopath known only as Buffalo Bill is kidnapping and murdering young women across the midwest. Believing it takes ones to know one, the FBI sends in Agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) to interview an insane prisoner who may provide psychological insights and clues to the killer's actions. The prisoner is psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). Brilliant yet psychotic, with a taste for cannibalism, Lecter will only help Starling in exchange for details and secrets about her own complicated life. This twisted relationship forces Starling not only to face her own demons, but leads her face-to-face with a demented killer, an incarnation of evil so overwhelming, she may not have the courage or strength to stop him. Horrific, disturbing, spellbinding. This thriller set the standard by which all others are measured. - Director:
- Jonathan Demme
- Cast:
- Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Lawrence A. Bonney
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High and Low (1963)Tengoku To Jigoku
Based on the Ed McBain novel, 'High and Low' is a gripping police thriller starring Toshiro Mifune. Wealthy industrialist Kingo Gondo (Mifune) faces an agonising choice when a ruthless kidnapper, aiming to snatch his young son, takes the chauffeur's boy by mistake - but still demands the ransom, leaving Gondo facing ruin if he pays up. An anatomy of the inequalities in modern Japanese society, High and Low is a complex film noir, where the intense police hunt for the kidnapper is accompanied by penetrating insight into the kidnappers state of mind. Kurosawa's virtuoso direction provides no easy answers, and in short, intense sequences, he portrays the businessman, the police and the criminal as equally brutal but nonetheless human. - Director:
- Akira Kurosawa
- Cast:
- Toshirô Mifune, Yutaka Sada, Tatsuya Nakadai
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Horror-master John Carpenter teams Kurt Russell's outstanding performance with incredible visuals to build this chilling version of the classic 'The Thing'. In the winter of 1982, a twelve-man research team at a remote Antarctic research station discovers an alien buried in the snow for over 100,000 years. Soon unfrozen, the shape-shifting alien wreaks havoc, creates terror and becomes one of them. - Director:
- John Carpenter
- Cast:
- Kurt Russell, Adrienne Barbeau, Wilford Brimley
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Safe their picturesque chateau behind the front lines, the French General Staff passes down a direct order to Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas): take the Ant Hill at any cost. A blatant suicide mission, the attack is doomed to failure. Covering up their fatal blunder, the Generals order the arrest of three innocent soldiers, charging them with cowardice and mutiny. Dax, a lawyer in civilian life, rises to the men's defense but soon realizes that, unless he can prove that the Generals were to blame, nothing less than a miracle will save his clients from the firing squad. - Director:
- Stanley Kubrick
- Cast:
- Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker, Adolphe Menjou
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From the acclaimed animation studio Laika (Coraline, The Boxtrolls) comes an epic original action adventure featuring the voice talents of Academy Award winners Charlize Theron and Matthew McConaughey. Kubo mesmerises the people in his village with his magical gift for spinning wild tales with origami. When he accidentally summons an evil spirit seeking vengeance, Kubo is forced to go on a quest to solve the mystery of his fallen samurai lather and his mystical weaponry, as well as discover his own magical powers. - Director:
- Travis Knight
- Cast:
- Charlize Theron, Art Parkinson, Matthew McConaughey
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Following a prolonged battle with addiction and self-destruction, Krisha (Krisha Fairchild), the black sheep of the family she abandoned, returns for a holiday celebration. But what begins as a moving testament to the family's capacity to forgive soon spirals into a deluge of emotional bloodletting, as old wounds are torn open, and resentments are laid bare. - Director:
- Trey Edward Shults
- Cast:
- Krisha Fairchild, Alex Dobrenko, Robyn Fairchild
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