Movies

Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim. But they spend precious little time together and none of them seems to know much about one another's family lives. This bizarre dichotomy underscores their alienation # the result of suburban ennui, a teenager's inherent sense of melodrama, and the disturbing nature of their home environments.

Enid and Rebecca after they finish the high school. Both have problems relating to people and they spend their time hanging around and bothering creeps. When they meet Seymour who is a social outsider who loves to collect old 78 records, Enid's life will change forever.

Seventh-grade is no fun. Especially for Dawn Weiner when everyone at school calls you 'Dog-Face' or 'Wiener-Dog.' Not to mention if your older brother is 'King of the Nerds' and your younger sister is a cutesy ballerina who gets you in trouble but is your parents' favorite. And that's just the beginning--her life seems to be falling apart when she faces rejection from the older guy in her brother's band that she has a crush on, her parents want to tear down her 'Special People's Club' clubhouse, and her sister is abducted....

A fable of innocence: thirteen-year-old Aviva Victor wants to be a 'mom'. She does all she can to make this happen, and comes very close to succeeding, but in the end her plan is thwarted by her sensible parents. So she runs away, still determined to get pregnant one way or another, but instead finds herself lost in another world, a less sensible one, perhaps, but one pregnant itself with all sorts of strange possibility. She takes a road trip from the suburbs of New Jersey, through Ohio to the plains of Kansas and back. Like so many trips, this one is round-trip, and it's hard to say in the end if she can ever be quite the same again, or if she can ever be anything but the same again.

A man about forty years of age tells the story from when he was a teenager in upscale suburban Detroit of his and three of his friends' fascination with the mysterious and doomed Lisbon sisters. In 1974, the sisters were seventeen year old Therese, sixteen year old Mary, fifteen year old Bonnie, fourteen year old Lux, and thirteen year old Cecilia. Their fascination still remains as they try to piece together the entire story. The sisters were mysteries if only because of having a strict and overprotective upbringing by their father, who taught math at the girls' private co-ed school, and overly devout Catholic mother, who largely dictated the household rules. The story focuses primarily on two incidents and the resulting situations on the girls' lives. The first was an action by Cecilia to deal with her emotions over her life. And the second was the relationship between Lux - the sister who pushed the boundaries of the household rules most overtly in doing what most teenagers want to do - and Trip Fontaine, he who could have any girl he wanted but wanting solely Lux.

Theater director Caden Cotard is mounting a new play. Fresh off of a successful production of Death of a Salesman, he has traded in the suburban blue-hairs and regional theater of Schenectady for the cultured audiences and bright footlights of Broadway. Armed with a MacArthur grant and determined to create a piece of brutal realism and honesty, something into which he can put his whole self, he gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in Manhattan's theater district. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a small mock-up of the city outside. As the city inside the warehouse grows, Caden's own life veers wildly off the tracks. The shadow of his ex-wife Adele, a celebrated painter who left him years ago for Germany's art scene, sneers at him from every corner. Somewhere in Berlin, his daughter Olive is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele's friend, Maria. He's helplessly driving his marriage to actress Claire into the ground. Sammy Barnathan, the actor Caden has hired to play himself within the play, is a bit too perfect for the part, and is making it difficult for Caden to revive his relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel. Meanwhile, his therapist, Madeline Gravis, is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counselling him. His second daughter, Ariel, is disabled. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. As the years rapidly pass, Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece. Populating the cast and crew with doppelgangers, he steadily blurs the line between the world of the play and that of his own deteriorating reality. As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both personally and professionally, a change in creative direction arrives in Millicent Weems, a celebrated theater actress who may offer Caden the break he needs.

Billy is released after five years in prison. In the next moment, he kidnaps teenage student Layla and visits his parents with her, pretending she is his girlfriend and they will soon marry (and forcing her to say the same).

1986. Jack Slavin, an engineer by trade, and his mid-teen daughter Rose Slavin live in virtual isolation on what was once a commune that Jack and a group of others built in 1968 on sparsely populated Marsh Island off the U.S. east coast. Rose's mother abandoned them when Rose was five. Jack has passed to Rose a sense of ecological preservation, placing them at odds with Marty Rance, who is building a housing complex on the island on a wetlands. They are able to live this life on the commune property in their ecological bliss due to a sizable inheritance, Jack who will occasionally take out his checkbook in order to solve whatever problem he may be facing. Jack also took Rose out of school when she was eleven as he didn't believe in what the traditional school system was teaching. Their quiet life together is threatened by the fact that Jack has a heart condition which will probably kill him sooner than later. Wanting to ensure that Rose is taken care of after his passing, Jack makes the unilateral decision to ask Kathleen, a woman who he has been dating for four months, to move in, along with her two mismatched sons, half-brothers Rodney and Thaddius who don't much like each other. Jack tries to pass Kathleen and her sons to Rose as "an experiment" and the three of them solely as "guests", rather than the reality of them truly moving in. Kathleen, who had never met Rose before, agreed in her savior complex and in truly loving Jack, knowing fully the reasons for he asking her. These changes deeply affect Rose, who has had Jack all to herself for the better part of her life - she who threatens to commit suicide after Jack dies - and comes at a key point in her own life as she is just starting to explore her sexuality.

The dysfunctional twenty-three-year-old Sarah takes her six-year-old natural son Jeremiah from the home of his beloved foster parents with the support of the social service to live with her. Along the years, the boy shares her insane and low lifestyle and is introduced to booze and drugs and mentally, physically and sexually abused by Sarah, her lovers and her religiously fanatic family.

A gay teenage prostitute and another teen, both from the same small town in Kansas, narrate separate stories from their childhoods. The prostitute's story is about a disturbing homosexual encounter with his pedophile baseball coach, and the other teen's story revolves around an amnesia blackout during which he thinks he may have been abducted by aliens. Later, the second teen finds clues linking the gay prostitute (now living in New York City) to his possible alien abduction, so he tracks him down to finally seek out the truth.

Astrid Magnussen (Alison Lohman) is a fifteen-year-old girl, living in California. Her mother, Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer), is a beautiful, free-spirited poet and artist who also suffers from a borderline personality disorder (BPD). Their life, though unusual, is satisfying until one day, a man named Barry Kolker (Sir Billy Connolly) (that her mother refers to at first as "The goat man") comes into their lives, and Ingrid falls madly in love with him, only to have her heart broken, and her life ruined. For revenge, Ingrid murders Barry with the deadly poison of her favorite flower: the White Oleander. She is sent to prison for life, and Astrid has to go through foster home after foster home. Throughout nearly a decade, she experiences forbidden love, religion, near-death experiences, drugs, starvation, and how it feels to be loved. But throughout these years, she keeps in touch with her mother via letters to prison. And while Ingrid's gift is to give Astrid the power to survive, Astrid's gift is to teach her Mother about love.

Disturbing, dark, low-budget independent film about teen-agers in New York City. The story focuses on Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a teen who has a goal to de-flower as many virgins as he can. When one of his old encounters discovers that she is H.I.V.-positive, after only one encounter with a guy, Telly remains undaunted.

Twenty-eight year olds Jon and Vince, friends from high school, meet in Vince's seedy motel room in Lansing, Michigan. Jon had invited Vince to town from his current residence of Oakland to help celebrate the fact of his latest movie, independently shot, having a screening at the local film festival the following day, the first public screening of one of his movies. While Jon seems to have grown up in having this career path and a nice room in an upscale hotel provided by the festival, Vince, who, in preparing for the evening has already had a few beer by the time Jon arrives, hasn't, he who deals drugs for a living with no change on the horizon, and his girlfriend, who was supposed to accompany him to Lansing, having broken up with him, indirectly because of his immaturity. This divergence quickly becomes an issue of contention between the two. But as Vince's behavior is seemingly more and more substance affected, he having broken out the weed and coke, his intention with Jon may be clearer than it appears on the surface, it having to do with an issue from high school which always seems to emerge in some respect every time they meet. That issue begins to hit home for Jon with a specific action by Vince. But everything may take a turn onto its head with the arrival onto the scene of a third - Amy - also a friend from high school involved in that issue ten years ago, she, now an Assistant D.A. in Lansing, who Vince had invited without Jon's knowledge and who Jon has not seen since high school.

A woman breaks up with her boyfriend, he thinks it's because he's fat. A man is unable to tell her next door neighbor he finds her sexually attractive. An old couple wants to split up, but they don't want to get a divorce. A therapist masturbates to teen magazines. An 11 year old kid is insecure about the fact that he hasn't cum yet. Office workers try to recall the face of a coworker who recently died. A woman is sure she has everything she could ever want. The lives of these individuals intertwine as they go about their lives in their own unique ways, engaging in acts society as a whole might find disturbing in a desperate search for human connection.

Lyle Jensen is subject to sudden and violent outbursts, and he is committed to the juvenile wing of the Northwood Mental Institution. Several other youths are there with a variety of serious problems. Lyle interacts with other patients and staff on a human, and sometimes not so human level. The psychological problems of the patients also forms the fabric by which we see what's right with them, and what's wrong with the society that affects them.

24 hours in L.A.; it's raining cats and dogs. Two parallel and intercut stories dramatize men about to die: both are estranged from a grown child, both want to make contact, and neither child wants anything to do with dad. Earl Partridge's son is a charismatic misogynist; Jimmy Gator's daughter is a cokehead and waif. A mild and caring nurse intercedes for Earl, reaching the son; a prayerful and upright beat cop meets the daughter, is attracted to her, and leads her toward a new calm. Meanwhile, guilt consumes Earl's young wife, while two whiz kids, one grown and a loser and the other young and pressured, face their situations. The weather, too, is quirky.

After racing in New Hampshire, the lonely motorcycle racer Bud Clay drives his van in a five-day journey to California for the next race. Along his trip, he meets fans, a lonely women, and prostitutes, but he leaves them since he is actually pining for the woman he loves, Daisy. He goes to her house and leaves a note telling where he is lodged. Out of the blue, Daisy appears in his hotel room and soon he learns the reason of why he can't find her.

The Travis family façade is destroyed by an event incomprehensible to them -- an event which will open locked doors and finally reveal the secrets that have haunted them for decades.