What's Eating Gibert Grape is a beautifully shot movie of tenderness, caring and self-awareness that is set amongst the fictional working class one street town Endora. Centred around the Grape family Ellen and Amy and their two brothers Arnie and Gilbert, who, along with their morbidly obese widowed mother Bonnie Grape are striving to survive and coexist with the absence of a father figure, low wage work and seventeen-year-old Arnie's severe mental condition. It is in this awkward and extremely one sided affair that the unfortunate Gilbert has to constantly, while working for the town's slowly dying convenience store, take care of his younger brother Arnie. Gilbert's life, his future, is thwarted he knows this, but it is in this guardian angel that his love and bond for Arnie cannot, and will not, be let go. That is until the free spirit of Becky arrives in town, and with her grandmother are stranded for the week while waiting for parts for their vehicle. This realization unties new feelings, new thoughts and new hope for the put upon Gibert, something new is eating Gilbert Grape.

In 1986, In Brooklyn, New York, the dysfunctional family of pseudo intellectuals composed by the university professor Bernard and the prominent writer Joan split. Bernard is a selfish, cheap and jealous decadent writer that rationalizes every attitude in his family and life and does not accept "philistines" - people that do not read books or watch movies, while the unfaithful Joan is growing as a writer and has no problems with "philistines". Their sons, the teenager Walt and the boy Frank, feel the separation and take side: Walt stays with Bernard, and Frank with Joan, and both are affected with abnormal behaviors. Frank drinks booze and smears with sperm the books in the library and a locker in the dress room of his school. The messed-up and insecure Walt uses Roger Water's song "Hey You" in a festival as if it was of his own, and breaks up with his girlfriend Sophie. Meanwhile Joan has an affair with Frank's tennis teacher Ivan and Bernard with his student Lili.

Mia, an aggressive fifteen-year-old girl, lives on an Essex estate with her tarty mother, Joanne, and precocious little sister Tyler. She has been thrown out of school and is awaiting admission to a referrals unit and spends her days aimlessly. She begins an uneasy friendship with Joanne's slick boyfriend, Connor, who encourages her one interest, dancing.

Against the backdrop of modern urban alienation in bustling Buenos Aires, two perfect strangers who live across the street in their shoebox apartments--the agoraphobic web designer, Martín, and the disenchanted architect, Mariana--find themselves trapped in a sea of nearly three million inhabitants. To make matters worse, even though they live on the same street, swim in the same pool, and walk side by side, those two sensitive long-time loners have never met. But, somehow, the high and impenetrable wall that keeps them apart, may be the very thing that can bring them together. Will Mariana and Martín ever find out that they are, indeed, kindred spirits?

Memoir of the lives of a family growing up on a post World War I British estate headed up by a strong disciplinarian, her daughter, her inventor husband, their ten year old son and his older sister. Through the household comes a number of suitors hoping to impress the young woman, including an aviator. When the elder woman's son shows up at the estate with his French fiancé, everything gets thrown into turmoil. The young boy takes a sudden interest in her sexual allure and his father is disturbed by his own non-Victorian feelings.

A Korean-born man finds himself stuck in Columbus, Indiana, where his architect father is in a coma. The man meets a young woman who wants to stay in Columbus with her mother, a recovering addict, instead of pursuing her own dreams.

Fourteen year old Lila envies the ease with which her best friend Chiara, on the cusp of her sixteenth birthday, deals with boys. Chiara has been sexually active, although she has only gone to third base with her current boyfriend, Patrick. With no experience whatsoever on the sexual front, Lila has no adult guidance with her mother having passed, and she and her father often being at odds with each other. Lila's primary exposure to sex or sexual foreplay is being the third wheel in Chiara and Patrick's outings. In her naivety, Lila believes that what she sees between Chiara and Patrick has the potential to last forever. Regardless of her total inexperience, Lila likes to portray herself as having at least gone to third base, she doing so by mimicking what she hears from Chiara and other sexually active teens. In her own mind, Lila wants to lose her virginity, despite, if she was honest with herself, being more closely emotionally mature to her twelve year old neighbor, Nate, than Chiara, Nate who would most likely be her confidante if she were to tell the truth about the issue of her sexuality. She believes the easiest candidate to be her first is Sammy, an older teen, who purportedly will sleep with anyone. As such, Lila begins to insert herself into Sammy's life, he who would not have even known who she was if she didn't do so. In doing so, Lila begins to place herself in situations where she is not emotionally mature enough to handle without being hurt in any aspect of the word.

Wong Kar-Wai's movie about two love-struck cops is filmed in impressionistic splashes of motion and color. The first half deals with Cop 223, who has broken up with his girlfriend of five years. He purchases a tin of pineapples with an expiration date of May 1 each day for a month. By the end of that time, he feels that he will either be rejoined with his love or that it too will have expired forever. The second half shows Cop 663 dealing with his breakup with his flight attendant girlfriend. He talks to his apartment furnishings until he meets a new girl at a local lunch counter.

Small town Sweden, in the 1950s. This slice-of-life story is also a coming-of-age tale narrated by a young boy with an almost unconscious sense of irony. His single mother is terminally ill, his older brother isn't the warmest person in his life, and twice he is sent to relatives in a supportive, loving village with interesting characters and adventures.

1985 Swedish film directed by Lasse Hallström

In euphoric early 1990s post-Communist Poland, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, four women experience an utterly different reality, sinking deeper and deeper into despair. Agata, a young married mother, finds herself consumed by an unhappy marriage and an almost obsessive infatuation for an unreachable man, as the frigid school principal, Iza, battles with rejection. Meanwhile, Iza's sister, Marzena, a 1986 beauty pageant winner and, nowadays, an aerobic instructor, suffers from her husband's long absence. Likewise, Renata, a reclusive middle-aged language teacher, finds solace in her singing birds and a silent longing for the unattainable object of her desire: her next-door neighbour. Sadly, as the quartet chases a pure and intense passion in all the wrong places, the piercing sadness of unrequited loves and the unceasing anguish of bitter obsessions linearly connect them. Does pain exist in the United States of Love?

Slice of Life

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