The Best Thought-provoking Movies to Watch (Page 8)

Girl won four awards at the Cannes Film Festival last year and was nominated to 9 Magritte Awards. It was also Belgium’s entry to the Oscar for best foreign-language film. When a dance school accepts her, Lara has the opportunity to realize her dream and become a professional ballerina. The dancing takes a toll on […]

By all outward appearances, The Villages—a massive and manicured retirement community in Florida—looks like it does offer paradise to its aging residents, as promised. The list of activities is endless, the seniors are all partnered up. “It’s like going back to college,” as one of them puts it, where people from all over the country […]

It’s impossible to describe this incredible movie as one thing or the other. It’s an epic three-hour saga that takes you through the Nazi era, the communist era, the rise of capitalism, and the East and West German divide. But more than its historic value, it’s a coming-of-age story, one that is based on the […]

Like a Wes Anderson movie, The Last Black Man in San Francisco takes artistic risks and nails every one of them. There are many quirky, aesthetically well-studied, and even funny aspects to this moving story. Jimmie has been maintaining a typical San Francisco Victorian house, regularly painting the windows and watering the plants. One small […]

The sooner you adjust your expectations for Nomad—and realize that this isn’t a travel documentary but Werner Herzog’s own wonderfully offbeat way of remembering his dear friend—the better. Any uneven moments in this film’s construction are smoothed over by the sheer authenticity of what Herzog puts on screen, from his own distinctive narration, to gorgeous […]

How far would you go for the people that you love? Regardless of the answer, whether that would be one mile, five hundred, or five hundred more, the distance won’t matter if there’s something that blocks you. 200 Meters is a drive with the titular length, it’s not even longer than a mile. But it […]

Shot on a hand-cranked silent camera with all the sound and dialogue added in during post, Bait immediately stands out as a film that appears lost in time. With the visual texture and slightly displaced audio of an independent film made during Hollywood’s infancy, the movie manages to convey its character and class conflicts with […]

In Lyon, the second biggest city in France after Paris, a man confronts the church about a prominent priest who sexually assaulted him and his friends when they were young. The man, being religious, wanted to keep the issue within the church. He only asked that the pedophile’s priesthood be revoked so that he doesn’t […]

There’s a mysterious, urgent power to Ear for Eye that survives the project’s movement from the stage to the screen. Against moody, bare backgrounds, debbie tucker green’s script becomes both story and setting—with words upon words overlapping, being repeated, and being used against each other, expressing the anxiety of entire generations of Black people trying […]

When thinking about buying something, it’s easy to only think about price and quality, but with many investigations around the world about inhumane labor practices, it’s no wonder that more people would like to look at the companies they’re buying from, or at least buy secondhand when possible. One such investigation is depicted in Letter […]

College seems to be teeming with possibility, in a more substantial way than adulthood or high school feels, since for many people, it’s the only time where one lives alone and makes decisions for their lives selfishly. Shithouse captures that moment with a candid sentimentality, all marked by a shared late night that changes the […]

In the year of the Netflix TV Show Maniac, another absurdist title stole critics’ hearts. Sorry to Bother You is a movie set in an alternate reality, where capitalism and greed are accentuated. Lakeith Stanfield (Atlanta) is a guy called Cassius who struggles to pay his bills. However, when at a tele-marketing job an old-timer […]

Given the nature of the subject (the discovery of a species that predates humans), this installment of the Unknown documentary movies has more fanfare than its predecessors. The narrative never transcends positing that a Homo Naledi is just like Homo Sapiens, but not really. The experts’ enthusiasm is often unsettling when you quickly realize that […]

Almost more like an audiobook than a traditional movie, the first and unfortunately final film from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson pairs soothing narration by Tilda Swinton with surreal images of alien structures on a desolate planet for a piece of sci-fi that may very well be un-categorizable. As a “story” ostensibly meant to carry some […]

We’re not aware of the reason why Pad Man didn’t just adapt Arunachalam Muruganantham’s life straight up. The biopic replaces their names, but the general story is the same, with Lakshmi creating a cheaper way to make sanitary napkins despite social stigma. Admittedly, it has all the cheesy biopic story beats. It gets frustrating to […]

Love at its infancy can be pure and sweet, but sometimes, when it’s forced down, locked up inside without calm acceptance, this yearning can fester into something toxic, something too passionate to control. Ride or Die is based on the Gunjō manga, which portrays a relationship between two high school girl best friends made toxic […]

At the first few moments, Song Lang seemed to be something akin to Farewell My Concubine– the film takes a snapshot of a communist Asian country in a different time, through the lens of a regional opera form with painted faces, elaborate costumes, and captivating tunes. But there’s more to Song Lang than this. Tragedy […]

In his last film, American Serb film historian Peter Bogdanovich celebrates silver screen legend Buster Keaton. The subject alone is compelling to watch. It would be easy to pull clips from Keaton’s works, dig through the headlines, pull in some celebrity interviews, and call it a day. However, in Bogdanovich’s hands, this documentary handles Keaton […]

Director Bryan Fogel, who you might know as the guy behind Jewtopia, initially set out to chronicle his exploration of doping to win an amateur cycling race. He starts off by reaching out to experts to help him with obtaining and administering said drugs, one of which points him towards Russian scientist Grigory Rodchenkov, the […]

Frank Zappa’s creative scope could barely be defined –  a mix of rock, composition, design, and in his early days even filmmaking.  This documentary does its best to summarize the un-summarizable, starting with Zappa’s last time playing guitar and going back to early details like an infatuation with explosives as a kid.  Zappa’s overwhelmingly full […]

While cable television didn’t have the same prestige as movies for decades, nevertheless the format garnered some influence, even then, with generations of viewers and filmmakers growing up in the medium. Dark Shadows is one such influential television show, and its journey from middling soap opera to groundbreaking drama is depicted in Master of Dark […]

First shown in 2021 Madrid International Film Festival, Support Group Olympus made its US debut early 2023 through Prime Video. Given the wacky premise, it was easy to assume that the film would be humorous, and there are moments when its dry humor shines. However, the film takes a more contemplative approach, as the unchanging […]

Iceland is a country of vast lands but limited population – only about 300,000 people can call themselves Icelandic. On the other hand, 8 million people have connecting flights through Iceland every year.  In this setting of mass movement, a single mother dealing with poverty is offered a chance to turn things around – a […]

Former activists Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife Leslie drop out from modern consumerist society to raise their six children in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. They teach them how to raise and kill their own food, to survive in nature through boot-camp-like workouts, and homeschool them in literature, music, and left-wing philosophy. […]

A poetic and peculiar movie from Senegal about a girl who is forced to marry a wealthy businessman instead of her love interest. The latter, a poor construction worker, embarks on a risky journey across the sea to Europe. The story takes a supernatural turn thereafter, one that is unlike anything seen before in stories […]

In another country, you can forge a completely different life from the one you had in your hometown. For closeted LGBTQ+ individuals, moving to a more tolerant society allows you to explore facets of your sexuality that wasn’t possible previously. In Goodbye Mother, first generation immigrant Nau Van is confronted with the secrets he hid […]

The Two of Us could have been a sweet romantic drama all about lifelong devotion regardless of the circumstances, but instead, first time director Filippo Meneghetti makes it feel more like an unsettling thriller that captures the paranoia and near insanity it feels to be closeted– with Nina having to beg Mado to tell her […]

Shot almost entirely in one take and on a tiny budget, and yet the central performance in this movie is still better than most big-budget dramas I’ve seen this year. Two indigenous women, one upper-class and the other impoverished, meet on the day that the rich one gets an IUD and the other one, pregnant, […]

With a forest home destroyed, leaving an adorable cat spirit child displaced, The Legend of Hei seemed like a Studio Ghibli-esque tale, at least in themes, child protagonist, and fantasy flying. There’s charming moments where Hei appreciates the day-to-day– moments where he diligently learns his powers, enjoys the simple human pleasures present in the modern […]

A great example that you don’t necessarily need millions of dollars to deliver something technically brilliant, Residue takes a simple story of a man coming home and layers its images and sound design together until it becomes something else entirely. And even with its aesthetic sophistication, the performances behind it still come off as nothing […]

Toni Collette, Jessie Buckley, and Jesse Plemons star in this mind-bending drama from Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich. The Young Woman, as she is known in the movie, takes a day trip with her boyfriend to his family’s secluded farm in Oklahoma. On the way, she thinks about breaking up with him. […]

At the beginning of Aamis, it’s easy to think that the film will be a unique forbidden romance drama where the lovers could only be satiated by food (and perhaps each other). To a certain extent, that’s correct. Like their love for unique food, it’s the yearning for the unusual and the strange that drives […]

The movie follows Martha (Vanessa Kirby), a young wife who loses her baby in a failed home birth. She tries her best to trudge through the aftermath of loss, but her coping attempts prove to be near impossible, not least because her husband Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and mother Liz (Ellen Burstyn) continually domineer every aspect […]

On Body and Soul is the impeccably crafted winner of the 2017 Berlin Film Festival and an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. Is it possible that two people dream the same dream? And meet each other in that same dream? This unique drama directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi studies this possibility […]

From Selma director Ava DuVernay, 13th addresses the second clause of the 13th amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” A clause that was immediately exploited and for which the consequences and interpretations explain a significant […]

While today’s moviegoers would likely pick Black Swan as the ballet film of choice, there is one film classic that brings the title of the best ballet film in contention. That is The Red Shoes. It first divided critics of film and ballet alike, but as time went by, the spectacular drama from Michael Powell […]