ash list

Encounter of three social classes of England at the beginning of the twentieth century: the Victorian capitalists (the Wilcoxes) considering themselves as aristocrats, whose only god is money; the enlightened bourgeois (the Schlegels), humanistic and philanthropic; and the workers (the Basts), fighting to survive. The Schlegel sisters' humanism will be torn apart as they try both to softly knock down the Wilcox's prejudices and to help the Basts.

Bothersome New York City high-school student Lisa Cohen (17), who consistently messes up her life and that of boy classmates, searches New York in vain for a fit cowboy hat to wear at an excursion with her separated father and stepmother. Spotting one on bus driver Maretti's head but failing to board, she stubbornly runs along and keeps claiming his confused attention, until the bus hits a blind senior, who is wounded fatally The NYPD quickly closes the case as an accident, but Lisa, duly consumed by guilt and spared any charge, starts bothering everyone and making a mean pest of herself, not only at home, as self-absorbed actress mother may deserve, but also in the precinct, tracking down the victim's uninterested kin out of town and even Maretti at home. A family friend lawyer gets involved in the case, digging in to compromising circumstances and causing real trouble to people who were of the hook.

Leonard Kraditor is a burned-out case, living with his immigrant parents after his fiancée left him, helping out at their Brooklyn dry cleaners, taking photographs, at loose ends, suicidal. In quick succession, he meets two women: Sandra, the daughter of his parents' business associates, frank, direct, sensual, Jewish like Leonard; and, his neighbor Michelle, mercurial, rootless, fun, blond, unattainable. Michelle is in love with a married man and cries on Leonard's shoulder; Sandra wants to save him. Is Leonard willing to risk losing Sandra's fidelity for the moments Michelle's moods swing toward him? Can this end well?

When Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett (Dame Maggie Smith) find themselves in Florence with rooms without views, fellow guests Mr. Emerson (Denholm Elliott) and son George (Julian Sands) step in to remedy the situation. Meeting the Emersons could change Lucy's life forever, but once back in England, how will her experiences in Tuscany affect her marriage plans?

Anna and Jacob fall instantly in love when they meet as students at an L.A. university. But Anna is British and when graduation approaches, Anna decides to stay and violate her student visa rather than returning to England. After a visit home, she is then unable to return to the United States. While fighting customs and immigration battles, Anna and Jacob must decide if their relationship is worth the distance and the hardship.

Homer is an orphan in remote St. Cloud, Maine. Never adopted, he becomes the favorite of orphanage Director Dr. Larch, who imparts his full medical knowledge on Homer, who becomes a skilled, albeit unlicensed, physician. But Homer yearns for a self-chosen life outside the orphanage. When Wally and pregnant Candy visit the orphanage, Dr. Larch provides a medically safe, albeit illegal, abortion, Homer leaves with them to work on Wally's family apple farm. Wally goes off to war, leaving Homer and Candy alone together. What will Homer learn about life and love in the cider house? What of the destiny that Dr. Larch has planned for him?

A kindhearted seventeen-year-old in the American Southwest turns to prostitution to fulfill her dream of a new life in San Francisco.

Joanna accuses her husband, Michael, of being attracted to his co-worker. Wanting to make-up before he goes on a business trip, she assumes she over-reacted. But when they are both away from each other for one night, Michael ends up testing his loyalty to Joanna and his attraction to Laura. And Joanna tests her honesty to Michael when her ex-boyfriend Alex suddenly appears in New York for the day.

Cathy is the perfect 50s housewife, living the perfect 50s life: healthy kids, successful husband, social prominence. Then one night she stumbles in on her husband Frank, kissing another man, and her tidy world starts spinning out of control. In her confusion and grief, she finds consolation in the friendship of their African-American gardener, Raymond - a socially taboo relationship that leads to the further disintegration of life as she knew it. Despite Cathy and Frank's struggle to keep their marriage afloat, the reality of his homosexuality and her feelings for Raymond open a painful, if more honest, chapter in their lives.

Based on Charles Dickens' timeless tale, this is a story of the love of a man for an unreachable woman. Updated to modern-day New York City, the story concerns a man of modest background who falls in love with a rich girl. But when a mysterious benefactor greenlights the man to make his dreams come true, everything done has the ultimate goal of making Estella fall in love with him.

Almost forty years ago, a young girl of fourteen has sex, gets pregnant, and gives her baby up for adoption. Fast-forwarding to the present day, we meet three very different women, each of whom struggles to maintain control of their lives. There's Elizabeth, a smart and successful lawyer who uses her body to her advantage. Any time she feels that she doesn't have the upper hand, and cannot control the situation, she uses her sex appeal - whether that be starting a romance with her boss when she suspects he is trying to start one himself, or finding some way to control her overly friendly neighbor and husband. Karen, meanwhile, is a bitter health care professional who obviously has a lot of heart but never shows it. She gave up a daughter at the age of fourteen (wonderfully shown rather than told, she is the young girl and mother of Elizabeth), and has never gotten over it - her bitterness inspiring her to lash out at everyone around her - even the gentle man at work who is undeniably drawn to her. Finally, Lucy is a woman who has failed to conceive with her husband, so she turns to adoption to make the family she desires.

Bill and Abby, a young couple who to the outside world pretend to be brother and sister are living and working in Chicago at the beginning of the century. They want to escape the poverty and hard labor of the city and travel south. Together with the girl Linda (who acts as the narrator in the movie) they find employment on a farm in the Texas panhandle. When the harvest is over the young, rich and handsome farmer invites them to stay because he has fallen in love with Abby. When Bill and Abby discover that the farmer is seriously ill and has only got a year left to live they decide that Abby will accept his wedding proposal in order to make some benefit out of the situation. When the expected death fails to come, jealousy and impatience are slowly setting in and accidents become eventually inevitable.

Following the death of their only offspring, an infant son named Cody, married New Yorkers Conor Ludlow and Eleanor Rigby - a struggling restaurateur and an academic working on her Ph.D. in Anthropology before Cody arrived in their lives - hit a rough spot in their relationship. Although still loving Conor, El is uncertain if she can bear what Conor represents to her and bear the grief even if Conor is no longer in her life. Following an incident, El decides to disappear from Conor's life, she taking refuge at the suburban home of her parents Julian and Mary Rigby, an academic himself and a musician respectively. Just to keep her mind active and off the thought of Conor or Cody, Julian suggests to El that she return to college and he pulls some strings for El possibly to enter into his colleague Professor Lilian Friedman's class. Despite being a therapist himself, he also tries to get El to see a therapist to deal with her grief. Meanwhile, Conor is facing his own emotional and professional problems, he believing his life being clear when he was with El. The restaurant was in part following his father Spencer Ludlow's professional footsteps, although Conor does not like to believe he is anything like his father in temperament, he who is on his third marriage, each of the previous two which failed. As Conor tries to locate El, he also has to deal with the downward slide of the restaurant, which he opened in another part as a cooperative arrangement with classically trained chef Stuart, a longtime friend who nonetheless doesn't treat cooking with much seriousness. Conor also has to deal with the logistics of packing up his and El's apartment which includes what to do with Cody's belongings. In his loneliness, Conor may fall prey to other women despite still loving El himself. With these two parallel tracks, the question becomes if they can find each other again both physically and emotionally.

1946 London. One evening, novelist Maurice Bendrix runs into his old friend, mild-mannered government minister Henry Miles, who he has not seen in two years. Maurice met Henry and his wife Sarah Miles in 1939 when they were neighbors off the Common, Maurice using the notion of Henry as research for a character for one of his novels. The reason they have not seen each other in such a long time is that last meeting is when Sarah, without warning, abruptly ended her affair with Maurice, an affair of which Henry had and has no knowledge. This meeting at least brings Maurice back into the Miles' realm and again seeing Sarah. Maurice is as dismayed to hear as Henry is dismayed to tell that he believes Sarah currently is having an affair. Beyond still being in love with her, the deeper reason for Maurice's dismay is not only Sarah having professed her eternal love for him during the time they were together, but her vow that she would never sleep with another man, her and Henry's marriage, while one of emotional need, not of romantic love or sex. Stemming from a conversation between the two men, Maurice employs a detective agency to discover the nature of what Henry believes is Sarah's affair. In the process of discovering what Sarah has been doing, Maurice may discover what happened to end their affair and if she has been true to her word of her eternal love and sexual faithfulness to him.

Set in 1950s Montana, "Wildlife" shows and tells the drama and angst that a teenage boy, Joe, goes through, witnessing both his parents split up in his presence. His father, Jerry, loses his job. And though he was offered his job back, he refuses to take it back because he "won't work for those kind of people anymore". So instead, he takes a job fighting a forest fire, which his wife, Jeanette, is dead set against, both for safety reasons, and because she's convinced that he will be unfaithful while away. But he leaves anyway. And yet, without anything happening to him, or any evidence of hanky-panky on his part, she acts the way one would expect her to act had he perished in the fire, or if she had found out that he had been unfaithful while away. This fact causes Joe to acquire uneasy feelings toward his mother. His father does return however. But the three are no happier for it, as Jeanette has taken up with a new significant other in her life. And Jerry reacts furiously against this. The parents wind up separating as she moves to take up a teaching job in Oregon, while Joe continues to live with his father. And then, she suddenly announces that she's taking the bus to visit over the weekend. Perhaps in an odd way, this movie combines both a satisfactory and unsatisfactory ending.

Gabrielle comes from a small village in the South of France at a time when her dream of true love is considered scandalous--even a sign of insanity. Her parents marry her to José, an honest, loving Spanish farm worker whom they think will make a respectable woman of her. Despite José's devotion to her, she vows that she will never love him and lives like a prisoner bound by the constraints of conventional post-World War II society until the day she is sent away to the Alps to heal her kidney stones. There she meets André Sauvage, a dashing injured veteran of the Indo-Chinese War who rekindles her long-buried passions. She promises that they will run away together, and he seems to share her desire. Will anyone dare rob her of her right to follow her dreams?

A tale of three women who have reached a turning point in their lives. Delia is a spirited, working-class woman from a small town in New York who leaves her abusive husband and sets out on a journey to reclaim the power she has lost. Greta is a sharp, spunky editor who is rotten with ambition. To spite the hated infidel ways of her father, she has settled into a complacent relationship and is struggling (not too hard) with issues of fidelity to her kind but unexciting husband. Finally Paula, who ran away from home and got pregnant, is now in a relationship she doesn't want. She's a troubled young woman who takes off on a journey with a hitchhiker after a strange, fateful encounter on a New York street.

It's 1955. Frank and April Wheeler, are in the 'seven year itch' of their marriage; they're not happy. April has forgone her dream of being an actress, and Frank hates his job. One day, April suggests they move to Paris as a means to rejuvenate their life.