movies i adore

After a long decade of total estrangement, grizzled Aunt Krisha shows up at her sister's home one fine Thanksgiving morning. Swearing she's got her act together now, Krisha is desperate to re-enter the family circle; however, wounded Krisha has deeply hurt people in the past. As a result, as her beloved ones greet her with a volatile mix of sympathy and wariness, right from the start, a corrosive undercurrent of silent discomfort permeates the multi-generational gathering. But Krisha is determined to let nothing stand in the way of reconciliation, so, without a second thought, she undertakes the crucial, risky task of cooking the turkey: her big chance to build a bridge. As heat caresses the turkey's crisp brown skin, wary glances and private conversations ratchet up the tension, and painful secrets come to light. Is the family's lost lamb ready to make up for lost time?

An aging jockey aims for a final championship, when a rookie rider arrives claiming to be his son.

Love, life, and the struggles of a mother bringing up a son in the late 70's. The ignorance of a free spirit against the needs of a young man trying to find his true character and beliefs. Living in a bohemian household shared with three like minded spirited people to help pay the rent, his mother tries to establish bonds that he cannot deal with. She cannot deal with his inability to talk, and enlists the help of other females in his life to share the burden of his upbringing. Slowly life unravels for them all without understanding how. In spite of their perceived struggles, they all go on to live defined lives without any serious consequences.

In a forgotten pocket of Southern Ohio where American manufacturing and opportunity are dying up, a determined young woman finds a ticket out when she is accepted to college. Alongside her older brother, Ruth Avery joins a dangerous scrap metal crew in order to pay her way. Together, they spend one brutal winter working the scrap yards during the day and stealing valuable metal from the once thriving factories at night. With her goal in sight, Ruth finds that the ultimate cost for an education for a girl like her may be more than she bargained for, and she soon finds herself torn between a promising future and the family she would leave behind.

A woman's life is derailed en route to a potentially lucrative summer job. When her car breaks down, and her dog is taken to the pound, the thin fabric of her financial situation comes apart, and she is led through a series of increasingly dire economic decisions.

David desperately tries to keep his family of six together during a separation from his wife. They both agree to see other people but David struggles to grapple with his wife's new relationship.

Certain Women drops us into a handful of intersecting lives across Montana. A lawyer (

Leda is a middle-aged divorcee devoted to her work as an English teacher and to her two children. When her daughters leave home to be with their father in Canada, Leda anticipates a period of loneliness and longing. Instead, slightly embarrassed by the sensation, she feels liberated, as if her life has become lighter, easier. She decides to take a holiday by the sea, in a small coastal town in Greece. But after a few days of calm and quiet, things take a menacing turn. Leda encounters a family whose brash presence proves unsettling, at times even threatening. When a small, seemingly meaningless event occurs, Leda is overwhelmed by memories of the difficult, unconventional choices she made as a mother and their consequences for herself and her family. The seemingly serene tale of a woman's pleasant rediscovery of herself soon becomes the story of a ferocious confrontation with an unsettled past.

A compilation of memoirs, focusing on the struggle of growing up and the diverse challenges of life.

Over the course of a decade, a young woman becomes increasingly dysfunctional due to undiagnosed mental illness, or perhaps to drugs, while her more stable friend sometimes tries to help, sometimes backs away to preserve herself.

Halley lives with her six year old daughter Moonee in a budget motel along one of the commercial strips catering to the Walt Disney World tourist clientele outside Orlando, Florida. Halley, who survives largely on welfare, has little respect for people, especially those who cross her, it an attitude that she has passed down to Moonee, who curses and gives the finger like her mother. Although the motel's policy is not to allow long term rentals, Bobby, the motel manager, has made arrangements for people like Halley to live there while not undermining the policy as he realizes that many such tenants have no place to go otherwise. Halley, Moonee and Moonee's friends, who live in the motel or others like it along the strip and who she often drags into her disruptive pranks, are often the bane of Bobby's existence, but while dealing with whatever problem arises, Bobby has a soft spot especially for the children and thus, by association, their parents, as he knows that Moonee and others like her are just children acting like a children under whatever guidance they have, Moonee who has less guidance than most. Although there are some lines which he will not tolerate to be crossed, Bobby lets most of the disruptive things that they do go, largely as long as it does not affect the bread and butter of the motel, namely the tourist trade. The summer in this collective is presented, when Moonee and her friends, such as Scooty, are out of school and are left largely to their own devices while self-absorbed Halley does whatever she wants, often just staying in the room watching TV. Halley is supposed to look after Scooty, the son of Halley's friend Ashley, they who live in the unit immediately underneath Halley and Moonee's, while Ashley is at work at a local diner. In turn, Ashley pilfers cooked meals from the diner to feed Halley, Moonee and Scooty. Over the course of the summer, Halley systematically begins to alienate one by one the people who are her unofficial support by responding with that disrespect to anything she feels is against her. As such, Halley begins to take more and more extreme measures to maintain the life she leads with Moonee.

"Safe" has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband, a beautiful house, servants, beauty, and a lot of friends. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone. That doesn't turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grandmal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she's become sensitive to the common toxins in today's world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong. An allergist finds that she has an allergic reaction to milk but explains that there is no treatment for that sort of allergy. She sees a psychiatrist who does nothing but make her nervous. In the hospital, Carol sees an infomercial for Wrenwood, a new-age retreat for those who are "environmentally ill," and leaves her husband and stepson to try and find salvation at this retreat: headed by a phony, grandstanding, "sensitive" individual named Peter Dunning.

Jimmie Fails IV, a black man, is a third generation San Franciscan. Having been pushed out by circumstances like many others, Jimmie, who works a low paying job as a nurse in a seniors' care facility, returned to San Francisco three years ago and has been living in his best friend Montgomery Allen's house that he shares with his blind grandfather, Jimmie who sleeps on the floor in Mont's already cramped bedroom. Despite the house, Mont's situation is not much better than Jimmie's, Mont who works at a supermarket fish counter while he sketches and writes a play on the side. Other black people around him who are showing their anger in also being disenfranchised from San Francisco life are the soapbox preacher who Jimmie and Mont often watch as they wait for the bus, and a group of young black men who hang outside of Mont's house. All of Jimmie's family, who he rarely sees, are also disenfranchised from that San Francisco life in one way or another: his estranged father lives in an SRO; his mother and her new husband long moved to Los Angeles; and his paternal Auntie Wanda has been pushed out to the suburbs. Jimmie has long wanted to reclaim what he sees as his place in San Francisco, which to him means the house he grew up in and which his same named paternal grandfather built in the post-war era in a style indicative to the area a century earlier. The problems are that his father lost the house long ago, the neighborhood has since been gentrified from the immigrant neighborhood it once was, increasing the value of the house to the several millions, and a white couple currently lives there, there being no indication that they are either planning on leaving or selling even if Jimmie could afford it. Regardless, Jimmie, with Mont by his side, has and continues to take steps to reclaim the house as his to his standards.

Yearning to own a small patch of land and be more than a chicken sexer, the ambitious paterfamilias, Jacob Yi, relocates his Korean-American family: sceptical wife, Monica, and their children, David and Anne, from California to 1980s rural Arkansas, to start afresh and capture the elusive American Dream. However, new beginnings are always challenging, and to find out what is best for the family, let alone start a 50-acre farm to grow and sell Korean fruits and vegetables, is easier said than done. But, amid sincere promises, cultural unease, fleeting hopes, and the ever-present threat of financial disaster, Jacob is convinced that he has found their own slice of Eden in the rich, dark soil of Arkansas. Can grandma Soonja's humble but resilient minari help the Yi family figure out their place in the world?

Inseparable best friends and cousins Autumn and Skylar precariously navigate the vulnerability of female adolescence in rural Pennsylvania. When Autumn mysteriously falls pregnant, she's confronted by conservative legislation without mercy for blue-collar women seeking abortions. With Skylar's unfailing support and bold resourcefulness, money to fund the procedure is secured and the duo board a bus bound for New York state to find the help Autumn needs.

A daughter helps her father prepare for the end of his life.

A family in Hawai'i faces the imminent death of their eldest as the ghosts of the past haunt the countryside.