Spotlight
Wondering which films to watch? Spotlight presents thematically grouped, must see films, hand-picked by Fandor's curators.
Director’s Lens
There are certain directors whose movies are instantly recognizable. They have a signature style, use recurring motifs, work with the same actors, and have a way of seeing life that is seamlessly translated onto the big screen. To view the world through someone else’s eyes is powerful and exciting, and exposure to different stories and realities is what makes movies so culturally crucial...and entertaining! The directors in this Spotlight are eclectic, but what they all share are inspired and original ways of captivating audiences with stories that stay true to their unique vision.
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Selected Films
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Jackie Brown
Jackie Brown supplements her meager income as a stewardess by smuggling cash into the U.S. for gun runner Ordell Robbie — until the day an ATF agent and an L.A. cop bust her at the airport. The cops pressure her to help them bring down Ordell, threatening prison if she refuses. With a sympathetic...Watch Movie
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Kung-fu Master!
A lovely, bittersweet companion to JANE B. PAR AGNÈS V. from director Agnes Varda and star/muse Jane Birkin, this film has nothing to do with martial arts (the film's title comes from an arcade video game played obsessively in the film by a teenaged boy, Julien). Birkin delivers one of her finest...Watch Movie
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Lars and the Real Girl
Lars Lindstrom is an awkwardly shy young man in a small town who finally brings home the girl of his dreams to his brother and sister-in-law's home. The only problem is that she's not real - she's a sex doll Lars ordered off of the internet. But sex is not what Lars has in...Watch Movie
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Basquiat
Nineteen-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat is a graffiti artist living on the streets. When he is discovered by Andy Warhol he is caught in a meteoric rise to the top of New York's art world. Basquiat's anguish over his family life and his hatred of the society that courted and exploited him both...Watch Movie
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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Suffering from acute kidney failure, Uncle Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating...Watch Movie
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In Another Country
Legendary French actress Isabelle Huppert stars in the first English-language film from South Korean master Hong Sang-soo, "the love child Antonioni and Hou Hsiao-hsien never had" (Village Voice). In a triptych of overlapping stories, three different French women (a filmmaker,...Watch Movie
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Wuthering Heights
Andrea Arnold's WUTHERING HEIGHTS is an excitingly fresh and distinct take on the classic novel by Emily Brontë. An epic love story that spans childhood well into the young adult years, the film follows Heathcliff, a boy taken in by a benevolent Yorkshire farmer, Earnshaw....Watch Movie
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Meek's Cutoff
Three 1840s' pioneer families become dangerously lost amidst the dust of the Oregon desert in Kelly Reichardt's sensory update of the Western genre, focusing not on typical fare like gun battles, card sharks or dramatic rescues but instead on the long, arduous journey westward. Having hired the...Watch Movie
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My Brother's Wedding
Pierce Mundy works at his parents' South Central dry cleaners with no prospects for the future and his childhood buddies are in prison or dead. With his best friend just getting out of jail and his brother busy planning a wedding to a snooty upper-middle-class black woman,...Watch Movie
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Hero
Alexandre Rockwell's rangy, offhandedly eccentric debut feature follows a disabled teenager and his older adoptive sisters who, when pronounced by some protective-services bureaucrat to be "not our idea of a normal family," shed their gloomy urban confines and set out for Truth or Consequences,...Watch Movie
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The Seduction of Mimi
THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI is a raucous comedy that brought international fame to director Lina Wertmuller. Giancarlo Giannini gives a wonderfully comic performance as the sad sack Mimi, a Sicilian laborer whose refusal to vote for the Mafia's candidate leads him to lose his job,...Watch Movie
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Cobra Verde
Werner Herzog’s final collaboration with Klaus Kinski was, like FITZCARRALDO and AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD before it, a fact-inspired saga of exotic physical adventure whose production was nearly as arduous as the events depicted. Based on Bruce Chatwin’s novel "The Viceroy of Ouidah" (which was,...Watch Movie
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Li'l Quinquin
Bruno Dumont proves as eccentric and engaging a director of comedy as he is of enigmatic art house drama with LI'L QUINQUIN, a four-part miniseries with the strangest genre mix this side of TWIN PEAKS. There is a tale of adolescent boredom and mischievous antics over a summer vacation in rural...Watch Movie
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The Connection
One of the most vital, fascinating films of the American independent world was created by a female director, Shirley Clarke, at a time when they were in very short supply. The film shattered stereotypes in just about every conceivable way. For her first feature film, she decided to take on a...Watch Movie
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Nostalghia
NOSTALGHIA is Andrei Tarkovsky's brooding late masterpiece, a darkly poetic vision of exile. It was the first of his features to be made outside of Russia, the home to which he would never return. Tarkovsky explained that in Russian the word "nostalghia" conveys "the love for your homeland and...Watch Movie
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Chlorophyl
Award-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins returned to his hometown of Miami for this mood-drenched look at love and alienation, created for the city’s Borscht Film Festival. Adrift in the gleaming white void of a new apartment, a young woman talks to an absent lover on the phone; later, she attends a...Watch Movie
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The Whole Shootin' Match
Eagle Pennell's first feature, THE WHOLE SHOOTIN' MATCH is a droll ballad about two dreamers chasing one "get rich quick" scheme after another (from flying squirrel farms to magic mops). The film follows our heroes until they finally get their dream-come-true and their...Watch Movie
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As Tears Go By
Though as gritty as any 80s Hong Kong gangster picture, AS TEARS GO BY is a watershed film heralding one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in international cinema. Wong Kar-Wai's visually stunning, tough and romantic 1988 first feature deftly smuggles the director's now celebrated genius...Watch Movie
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We Can't Go Home Again
The most complete, newly restored version of Nicholas Ray's experimental masterpiece, made with his students at the State University of New York at Binghamton, WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN embodies Ray's approach to filmmaking as a communal way of life. The film records Ray's...Watch Movie
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Three Sisters
One of his generation's most important documentary filmmakers, director Wang Bing is at the height of his powers in THREE SISTERS. The film introduces viewers to ten-year-old YingYing, six-year-old Zhenzhen and four-year-old Fenfen, who live alone in Xiyangtang, a tiny rural village in the high...Watch Movie
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Trees Lounge
All Tommy wants from life is what everyone else has- a job, a girl, a good time. But the harder he tries, the worse things get. And the more time he spends at Trees Lounge, his Long Island neighborhood bar, the more involved he gets with the lives of the colorful characters he meets there....Watch Movie
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The Pain of Others
THE PAIN OF OTHERS is a found footage documentary about Morgellons, a mysterious illness whose sufferers say they have parasites under the skin, long colored fibers emerging from lesions, and a host of other bizarre symptoms which could be borrowed from a horror film. Tens of...Watch Movie
