Films and media

Documentaries, films and series, with one sentence on what each covers.

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The Return
Andrey ZvyagintsevFilm2003
Two brothers' long-absent father returns without explanation and takes them on a tense journey to a remote island.
Lion
Garth DavisFilm2016
A man adopted from India as a boy and raised in Australia sets out years later to find the mother and home he was separated from as a child.
Central Station
Walter SallesFilm1998
A jaded former teacher who writes letters for the illiterate reluctantly helps an orphaned boy travel across Brazil to find the father he has never met.
Rain Man
Barry LevinsonFilm1988
A self-centred salesman discovers he has an autistic older brother in an institution and takes him on a cross-country trip to claim their father's inheritance.
Au revoir les enfants
Louis MalleFilm1987
At a Catholic boarding school in occupied France, a boy forms a close friendship with a new pupil who is secretly Jewish, until the war intrudes.
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Benh ZeitlinFilm2012
A six-year-old girl living with her ailing father in a flooded bayou community faces his decline and a rising storm through a fierce inner mythology.
The Piano
Jane CampionFilm1993
A mute Scottish woman sent to New Zealand for an arranged marriage pours her feeling into her piano and into an affair with the man who possesses it.
American Beauty
Sam MendesFilm1999
A disillusioned suburban father becomes infatuated with his teenage daughter's friend and starts upending his life as his family quietly falls apart.
Talk to Her
Pedro AlmodóvarFilm2002
Two men form an unlikely friendship while tending to the comatose women they love, and one man's devotion crosses a grave line.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour
Abdellatif KechicheFilm2013
A French teenager's life and sense of herself are transformed by a passionate first love with an older art student, and by its painful end.
Brokeback Mountain
Ang LeeFilm2005
Two ranch hands begin a secret love affair one summer in Wyoming and carry it, unlived and unresolved, across twenty years of separate married lives.
Call Me by Your Name
Luca GuadagninoFilm2017
During a summer in northern Italy, a teenage boy and his father's graduate student fall into a brief, intense romance.
Wild at Heart
David LynchFilm1990
A young couple flee across the American South while the woman's mother, bent on stopping them, sends killers after her daughter's lover.
Lust, Caution
Ang LeeFilm2007
In wartime Shanghai, a young woman posing as a seductress in a plot to assassinate a collaborator finds herself dangerously drawn to her target.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Marielle HellerFilm2015
In 1970s San Francisco, fifteen-year-old Minnie begins an affair with her mother's boyfriend and records her sexual and creative awakening in an audio diary.
An Education
Lone ScherfigFilm2009
In early 1960s London, a bright schoolgirl is courted by a charming older man and nearly abandons her studies before discovering the truth about him.
Blue Valentine
Derek CianfranceFilm2010
The film cuts between the hopeful beginning and the bitter end of a working-class marriage, following Dean and Cindy as their love forms and then falls apart.
sex, lies, and videotape
Steven SoderberghFilm1989
An impotent drifter who films women talking about their sex lives arrives in a Louisiana town and disrupts the marriage of an old friend and his unhappy wife.
The Sessions
Ben LewinFilm2012
A man confined to an iron lung by polio hires a professional sex surrogate, with the counsel of his priest, to experience physical intimacy for the first time.
Moonlight
Barry JenkinsFilm2016
A boy grows into a man across three chapters in Miami, under a mother lost to addiction and a self he cannot yet claim.