The Best Emotional Movies to Watch on Hoopla

At two hours and nearly 30 minutes, Stonewalling is quite long. The third film from spouses Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji takes place in slow, slice-of-life moments, centered around a female lead that mostly doesn’t actively make choices for her own life, so it can feel frustrating to watch. But as the film unfolds, Lynn’s […]

Be prepared to have the expectations you form after reading Scrapper’s synopsis shattered: though it is about a 12-year-old dealing with grief following her mother’s death, it’s remarkably upbeat. It gets that quality by positioning itself in the buoyant headspace of young Georgie, a resilient, cheeky youngster who retains much of her whimsical childlike spirit […]

Jules’ wacky premise — an extra-terrestrial crash-lands in eccentric widower Milton’s (Ben Kingsley) flowerbeds — is a bit of a misdirection. While the movie is technically a sci-fi (featuring, as it does, some very out-there alien engineering), it’s really a charming, mostly-human drama about the isolation and surreality of aging.  Though the mute presence of […]

Who among us hasn’t committed a white lie to save a relationship? And who among us hasn’t yearned for the full and brutal truth? In You Hurt My Feelings, Nicole Holofcener digs into that paradox and delivers a film that is honest and funny in equal measure. Here, the writer-director doesn’t just use a hilarious […]

As the third instalment in Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” trilogy after First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardner rounds up the issues at stake in a most profound way. For anyone who’s seen a film either scripted by Schrader (such as Taxi Driver) or directed by him, there will be […]

Like many coming-of-age films about films, it’s easy to assume that Last Film Show would be a derivative of all-time film classic Cinema Paradiso. Both films from opposite corners of the world, separated by more than three decades, do share that awe of cinema from a projection booth. However, unlike Paradiso, the awe of Last […]

Of the three Brontë sisters—all of whom are accomplished writers in their own right—it’s Emily who remains the most enigmatic to this day. She died early and left in her wake just one work: her first and only novel, Wuthering Heights. The book shook England back then; it was rugged and sexual and violent, and […]

Whether or not you’re a fan of Nick Cave’s contemplative, idiosyncratic style of music, This Much I Know to Be True still works on a purely experiential level. There’s confusion, then a rush of euphoria, then an overwhelming sense of peace when listening to Cave’s (and musical collaborator Warren Ellis’s) cryptic lyrics and delicate compositions—shot […]

Johnny is a story you’ve heard of a thousand times, but what makes it particularly endearing is that it’s all true and based on the real-life Father Jan Kaczkowski, a priest who went out of his way to help others. Kaczkowski led an extraordinary life, and the film honors that not by putting him on […]

Rather than talking about what it takes to get to the other side of the border, Identifying Features instead focuses its attention back home. It’s part of the reason why the film actually highlights how difficult this actually is– Before even reaching it, people hoping to enter America go through a dangerous journey, many of […]

“Youth is a state of mind,” a poet once said — but, young in spirit though they are, the elderly artist couple at the center of this fly-on-the-wall documentary must confront the harsh reality that aging isn’t something the body can avoid. Jackie and Don Seiden — a yin-and-yang pair who describe themselves as “a […]

It would be understandable if it only occurs to you midway through that Little Girl isn’t actually a narrative feature but a gorgeously made documentary. Director Sébastien Lifshitz approaches his main character of Sasha not just with respect and empathy for her identity, but with a dedication to bring out the euphoria of feeling comfortable […]

This movie narrated by Nicolas Cage is the incredible story of actor Anton Yelchin (Star Trek, Like Crazy): from being born to a Jewish Russian family in Leningrad to moving to the U.S. and ending with his sudden death at age 27. Anton, or Antosha as his loved ones called him, was a gifted kid: […]

Hassan Fazili and Nargis Fazili are two filmmakers who, faced with death threats, escape their home in Afghanistan and start a journey to Europe that millions of others have taken over the past few years. But unlike most others, the Fazilis filmed everything on their way. The result is not only a portrayal of the […]

When it comes to fantasy anime between two races, usually there would be some sort of romance between the leads. But Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms does it differently. Instead, between the humans and the immortal humanoid lorph race that weaves a chronicle of their history is a mother-son relationship, with the human son […]

Asako is in love with Baku—deeply and almost delusionally, in a way that can only manifest in young love. But when the freewheeling Baku ghosts Asako for good, she moves from Osaka all the way to Tokyo to start a new life. Years later, she’s startled to meet Baku’s doppelganger in Ryohei, an office man […]

This coming-of-age story starts in the present time, where Elle Marja, now a grandmother, reluctantly goes to her sister’s funeral held by her old indigenous Sámi community in Northern Sweden. Understanding her reluctance requires going back to when Elle Marja was 14 and was preparing to go to boarding school with her little sister. These […]

When German forces occupy Paris in 1942, a close-knit Jewish family tearfully sends their two youngest sons, Jo and Maurice, to escape the city on foot, with promises that they will all eventually be reunited in the Free Zone in the South. Told from the perspective of Jo – and based on the 1973 memoir […]

Here’s a based-on-a-true-story courtroom drama that transcends the limits of its genre by virtue of an incisive and unexpectedly prescient script. Twenty years before 2016 sent us hurtling through the looking glass and into a post-truth era, the idea that you could deny the facts as you pleased teetered terrifyingly on the brink of legitimacy […]

There are moments in cinema when the character and actor are irrevocably linked– to think of one is to think of the other, to the point that the line is blurred between both. One such pair is Spock and Leonard Nimoy, and, after his death, it was inevitable that the documentary about Nimoy would also […]

This slow-burning drama is set in an Indigenous reservation in South Dakota, where Johnny is a teenager who dreams of moving to L.A. with his girlfriend. He would have to leave behind his little sister, who is just grappling with the recent loss of their father.  Director Chloé Zhao (The Rider, Nomadland) worked with amateur […]

Not to be confused with the American cop thriller with the same name, Shōhei Imamura’s Black Rain is about the atomic bomb, but it’s not really concerned about nuclear warfare. Sure, the film opens with gruesome shots of the day the bomb dropped, not sparing the viewers from the gore and the titular nuclear fallout, […]

The end of the world, of course, forces people to contemplate one’s life purpose, the choices they made, and the opportunities they chose over others. Andrei Tarkovsky examines this idea in The Sacrifice– juxtaposing a hypothetical third World War with main character Alexander’s choices, the choices that led him to a successful acting career, but […]

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 […]

Cheerfully outrageous yet heartwarmingly tender, the Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was ahead of its time, daring to dive into drag and transexuality, when the rest of the world was still coming around to accepting homosexuality. On the bus which the title is named after, two drag queens and a trans woman have […]

When depicting a person’s life, most films are chronological. They start from beginning to end, from the character’s birth to their death. However, it’s only fitting for Peppermint Candy to depict the opposite because, mild spoilers: the film starts with a suicide. What would push a person to do such a thing? Director Lee Chang-dong […]

To Hollywood’s shame, it wasn’t until 1998 that a major feature made by Native American filmmakers was released. It was this charming indie gem that belatedly broke that new ground: based on author Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Smoke Signals retains the irreverent humor hinted at in its source material’s […]