Films and media
Documentaries, films and series, with one sentence on what each covers.
Amour
Michael Haneke · Film · 2012
An elderly music teacher cares for his wife through a series of strokes, and a lifelong marriage meets its end at home.
Manchester by the Sea
Kenneth Lonergan · Film · 2016
A withdrawn handyman is made guardian of his teenage nephew and forced back to the town where his life came apart.
Nomadland
Chloe Zhao · Film · 2020
After losing her husband and her company town, a woman in her sixties sells up and lives out of a van, taking seasonal work across the American West.
Her
Spike Jonze · Film · 2013
A lonely writer recovering from divorce falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system, until she grows beyond the bond they share.
A New England couple's marriage fractures under buried rage and grief after their college-age son is killed by the jealous ex-husband of the woman he loved.
A Chinese American woman returns home for a staged wedding that is really a pretext for the family to gather and say goodbye to her dying grandmother, who is not told.
Two childhood friends in Seoul are separated when one emigrates, and reunite in New York two decades later to weigh the life and love they never had.
A war reporter dying of cancer asks an old friend, a novelist, to stay in the house while she ends her life on her own terms.
A Fantastic Woman
Sebastian Lelio · Film · 2017
When her older partner dies suddenly, a young trans woman in Santiago is treated with suspicion and denied a place among the mourners at his funeral.
Garden State
Zach Braff · Film · 2004
A sedated young actor returns to New Jersey for his mother's funeral, comes off his medication and, through a new relationship, begins to feel his grief.
The Whale
Darren Aronofsky · Film · 2022
A reclusive, severely obese online writing teacher, eating himself to death in grief, spends a week trying to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter.
Fanny and Alexander
Ingmar Bergman · Film · 1982
After their father dies and their mother remarries a severe bishop, two children in early-1900s Sweden endure a cold new household and retreat into imagination.
Padre Padrone
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani · Film · 1977
A Sardinian shepherd, taken out of school as a boy to work in isolation by his tyrannical father, fights to gain language, learning and a self of his own.
The Tin Drum
Volker Schlondorff · Film · 1979
In Danzig between the wars, a boy so repelled by the adult world wills himself to stop growing at three, protesting through his tin drum and a glass-shattering scream.
Pelle the Conqueror
Bille August · Film · 1987
A Swedish widower and his young son emigrate to Denmark for farm work, where the boy's love for his ageing, powerless father gives way to a longing to leave.
The Squid and the Whale
Noah Baumbach · Film · 2005
In 1980s Brooklyn, two boys are pulled between their competitive novelist father and their mother as the parents' marriage breaks up and the family divides.
Shoplifters
Hirokazu Kore-eda · Film · 2018
A family scraping by on the margins takes in a neglected girl, and the ties that hold them turn out not to be blood.
Mommy
Xavier Dolan · Film · 2014
A widowed Quebec mother brings her volatile teenage son home from institutional care and, with a withdrawn neighbour's help, tries to build a life with him.
Child's Pose
Calin Peter Netzer · Film · 2013
After her grown son kills a boy in a car accident, a controlling Bucharest mother pulls every string she can to keep him out of prison.
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lynne Ramsay · Film · 2011
A mother looks back on her fraught relationship with her son as she tries to live with the aftermath of the school massacre he committed.