The Best Depressing Movies to Watch on Kanopy (Page 2)

This teenage crime drama contains enough grit to stand on its own, but The Tribe’s real hook is in the way it’s told: entirely in Ukrainian sign language, without subtitles. Set in a boarding school for deaf students, new arrival Sergei must contend with an institution that’s run like a gang. His journey through the […]

When the country rises in rebellion against your dictatorial rule, we imagine that could be quite difficult. After a series of failures and atrocities committed to keep power, no one in the world would empathize with the dictator in question. Doing exactly this, however, made for a striking movie in The President. Never naming an […]

Wendy (Michelle Williams) is a drifter driving up to Alaska in hopes of finding work. When her car breaks down, she and her dog Lucy are stranded and forced to scrounge for food and repairs, hitting one roadblock after another on her path to an uncertain dream. This sympathetic and solemn look at poverty from […]

With an acrobat in a sanitarium, elephant trunks spouting blood, and a religious cult whose patron saint is a rape victim, Santa Sangre isn’t going to be an easy watch, especially with the avant-garde direction of the iconic Alejandro Jodorowsky. It’s tough to watch the explicit scenes, both of Fenix’s childhood circus reality and his […]

With numerous adaptations of the titular creature of the night, it’s inevitable that Nosferatu the Vampyre would be compared to its other versions. Nevertheless, Werner Herzog’s colored talkie version sticks close to the classic Expressionist film down to having many of the same scenes recreated beat for beat, but there’s a clear reverence to the […]

In modern day Europe, demonic possession seems to be a thing of the past, something most likely to be attributed to mental illness, and something that can be dealt with through modern medicine, not exorcism. Still, exorcisms are conducted in certain areas in the continent, and some instances don’t go the way they should. Inspired […]

The Central Park Five is a harrowing documentation of the unseen narrative surrounding the 1989 Central Park Jogger case. Five men – four black and one of Hispanic descent – have been wrongly accused, tried, and convicted for the assault, rape, and sodomy of female jogger Trisha Meili the night of April 19. No (DNA) […]

Many people would rather see happy, positive depictions of people like them, but sometimes, it’s important to see the sides that we don’t really like to see, but should have some awareness of, in order to address them. It’s because of this director Lee Tamahori initially thought that adapting the Maori novel Once Were Warriors […]

In response to violence, some people consider aggression as the only solution, especially in a place that cannot rely on institutions– fighting fire with fire, but fighting for the good. Tyrannosaur depicts a British town with men that only operate on a mix of this idea, but this rage becomes relentless, unceasing, and never lies […]

The atmosphere communicated within the title Hurricane Season comes off incredibly clearly on screen: this is a film that just feels humid and full of foreboding for a coming storm, with people feeling all manner of guilt while secluded in their own homes. Cinematographer María Secco’s gorgeous colors and brown tones fill the 4:3 aspect […]

Tied together by a song that seems to drive people to end their own lives, Gloomy Sunday’s tale of polyamorous love torn apart by the advent of the Second World War is one that doesn’t operate according to your usual narrative structure. Its stranger elements might not always work with the very real horrors of […]

Andrew Garfield is a single father living with his own single mother in their family home. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, they find themselves evicted from their home by a businessman – Michael Shannon in a role as intriguing as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, if not more. Desperate for work, Garfield’s character […]

An inspiring documentary about famed artist Ai Weiwei who has been the source of arguably the biggest public confrontation with the Chinese government by any artist. His straightforward attitude is made to provoke and to defend the people of China against the totalitarian regime. The film portrays Weiwei’s very visible struggle for redemption and invoke […]

Realistic, intimate, and compelling, Elena is a movie that makes you think a lot after you finish watching it. It is an inherently Russian movie, however there is something about how the story is told that makes it a universal family drama. A woman from a modest background to which she still has a lot […]

A Ken Loach type of vibe drives The Selfish Giant  to be an interesting mix between anger,  desperation, and the beauty and humor often found in tough circumstances (think I, Daniel Blake but with kids as main characters). This sort of contemporary fable tells the story of two friends who skip school and hustle for work from a local scrap-dealer.  […]

Given that it is a modern day, colored film remake of a classic, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai was always going to be compared to the 1962 film, especially since it’s considered one of the greatest Japanese films of all time. Admittedly, there’s not a lot added aside from the 3D filming, and for fans […]

You can tell Drugstore Cowboy was written by someone who has been through drug abuse and incarceration himself. This is the kind of film that has to be lived, not researched. It’s realistic, sure, and it gets at the interiority of a drug user with ease. But there is no judgment to be found here, […]

There are two ways to sum up this documentary. One will make you decide against watching it. Here’s that pitch: This is the story of a homeless woman who was found dead. Here’s the better pitch: That woman was highly educated and generally lived a happy life. But she also left behind a detailed journal […]

When we think about the atrocities committed during World War II, most people would remember the Holocaust, but this war was fought on multiple fronts, not just the West, and one of the most notorious incidents was the Rape of Nanjing. City of Life and Death depicts the massacre in black and white through various […]

A Kurdish-Iraqi immigrant runs into serious immigration problems as he tries to immigrate from France to England in order to be reunited with his girlfriend. Eventually he begins to train in swimming, in an attempt to swim the channel between France and England. Welcome is a gripping tale of tolerance as well as relationships between […]

See, low budget films do work! Like Crazy schools other romantic films on what they should all be: cute and sweet but also frustrating and nerve-wracking. Felicity Jones is absolutely fantastic here, she stars as a British girl who falls in love with an American, Jacob, while in college. On a whim, she overstays her visa […]

This is one of the most compelling and personal documentaries I’ve seen, revealing a side of life most people never consider. It’s the story of a young man recovering from a head injury and the obsession he’s developed with models and action figures. Not content with merely collecting, we see the man develop elaborate story-lines and plots between […]

An electrifying portrayal of a girl growing up in a poor Paris suburb. This coming-of-age story follows Marieme, a girl struggling in high-school who learns that she will be rerouted out of academia and onto a track where she will learn a trade. Frustrated by the news and fearful of an abusive elder brother, she […]

Released in the same year as the title, Nineteen Eighty-Four stands as a picture of a future that has not come to pass, at least as of writing. It’s a bleak vision. The novel’s world has been adapted to the screen in the grayest and coldest of settings, as the mass populace eat slop, dress […]

For better or worse, death strikes us all, fast and unexpectedly. It’s tough enough if the death is caused by ill health or accidents, but when premeditated by another person– it can be easy to lose faith in a higher power. Secret Sunshine depicts a grieving mother trying to start a new life in the […]

Five orphaned sisters are put under house arrest by their uncle and grandmother after they are seen horsing around with local boys from school. While their actions were purely innocent, their behavior is viewed as scandalous and shameful by the conservative elders in their small Turkish village. After this incident, their grandmother turns her attention […]

Prior to being defined by that fateful bombing in 1945, Hiroshima was like any other city outside of Tokyo; small but full, quiet but busy, and in the midst of a slow-but-sure journey to modernization. We experience the rich and intimate details of this life through the kind-hearted Suzu, who herself is stuck between the […]

Danish writer-director Lars von Trier concludes his so-called Depression trilogy with the two parts of Nymphomaniac, an elaborate retelling of the life of a young woman (played by Stacy Martin and then, by Charlotte Gainsbourg) lived from one libidinous pleasure to another. The film’s elaborate subplots have a life of their own and flashbacks often […]

This is a touching saga based on the plight of the women labelled as “fallen” that the Magdalene Laundries housed in Ireland. The movie grips you by the throat right from the first minute and the sense of injustice to women that characterizes the entire length of the film only rarely eases up to give […]

Ever wondered how much your life will change when faced with the reality that death is about to come? That’s normal, and not nearly as life-altering as being told you only have a few more moments to live. Because of a terminal illness, Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is driven to this situation and tries to right […]

When categorizing Lars von Trier’s oeuvre, critics speak of a “Depression Trilogy” bookended by Antichrist and Nymphomaniac, but Melancholia is the one that really embodies the concepts and worries nested at the heart of this project. The Danish director may be known for his provocative approach to filmmaking and disregard of taboos, but with this […]

While zombies weren’t new in film, it wasn’t until writer-director George A. Romero’s Living Dead saga that the zombie as we know it today was created. Day of the Dead is the third in the franchise, and like Night and Dawn, Romero was more interested in the way humans were the threat, more so than […]

While surpassed by the masterpiece Tár, Todd Field already garnered critical acclaim by his first feature debut In The Bedroom all the way back in 2001. The story is a familiar revenge drama that we might have heard from stories from small towns, but the way Field captures it is fascinating, with its challenging, layered […]

Not for the faint of heart, this Russian-language Swedish film doesn’t actually display anything graphic on screen, but it still makes for a difficult and distressing viewing experience. Many films similar in spirit and subject matter have been released in the decades since Lilya 4-ever’s own take on human trafficking and child sexual exploitation, which […]

Always follows the story of Jeong-hwa and Cheol-min, both very different individuals who are gentle in their own way. The story starts off by demonstrating how different the leads are in terms of their personality and their outlook on life. The plot can be a little predictable and cliche in some moments, but Always is […]

Based on the 1976 novel of the same name, Ordinary People is an emotionally wrought film about a family on the brink of collapse. Upon the tragic death of eldest son Buck, the youngest and now only son Conrad (Hutton) reluctantly enters psychiatric care while his mother, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore), tries to force things […]