Realism
see all genres ›Character development and emotional themes are key to the dramatic film. Though generally serious, dramas range widely in tone and scale. Intimate relationships and social issues are perennial subjects.
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Genres / Drama / Realism
SUB-GENRES · Pseudodocumentary · Docudrama · Social Realism · Neo-realism · Magic Realism · Pseudorealism
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A Film Unfinished
At the end of WWII, 60 minutes of raw film, having sat undisturbed in an East German archive, was discovered. Shot by the Nazis in Warsaw in May 1942, and labeled simply "Ghetto," this footage quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record of the Warsaw...Watch Movie
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Wendy and Lucy
Named to over sixty "Best of 2008" lists (and even many "Best of the Decade" lists), WENDY AND LUCY solidified filmmaker Kelly Reichardt's reputation for films that are (according to the New York Times) "a touchstone of the new realism in American cinema." Drifting upwards to Alaska like a 21st...Watch Movie
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Fitzcarraldo
Werner Herzog's most epically-scaled film was inspired by an actual historical incident of stranger-than-fiction curiosity. In the late 1800s Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald had an entire steamship laboriously transported over a mountain in order to open a trade passage from rubber-rich...Watch Movie
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Sami Blood
Elle Marja, 14, is a reindeer-herding Sami girl. Exposed to the racism of the 1930's and race biology examinations at her boarding school she starts dreaming of another life. To achieve this other life she has to become someone else and break all ties with her family and culture.Watch Movie
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Russian Ark
Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (THE SUN) broke boundaries with his dreamlike vision of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, RUSSIAN ARK. It's the first feature-length narrative film shot in a single take (on digital video, using a specially designed disc instead of tape). RUSSIAN ARK is shot...Watch Movie
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Elles
Director Malgorzata Szumowska's ELLES paints an unromantic picture of upper-crust domesticity. ELLES stars the fearless Juliette Binoche (CHOCOLAT) as Anne, a well-off Parisian journalist investigating the lives of two student prostitutes (Joanna Kulig and AnaпїЅs Demoustier) for a magazine...Watch Movie
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Travellers and Magicians
Khyentse Norbu’s follow-up to his audience favorite THE CUP is the first feature film ever shot in the tiny kingdom of Bhutan. One of Himalayan Buddhism’s most revered lamas, Khyentse (aka Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche) weaves parallel fable-like tales about two men who seek to...Watch Movie
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In the City of Sylvia
A young artist searches the winding streets of Strasbourg for an old love in Jose Luis Guerin's acclaimed and exceedingly beautiful IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA. During a languid summer, a young man spends his afternoons sketching in an outdoor café. He is looking for a woman he met...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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The Brave One
A film full of warmth and sensitivity, THE BRAVE ONE is the story about the friendship of a boy and a bull. Gitano, or Gypsy, is the name the boy gives the bull whose life he saves during a storm. The animal follows him around like a puppy until the legal owners spirit the mature Gitano away to...Watch Movie
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On the Bowery
ON THE BOWERY chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York's skid row, the Bowery. When the film first opened it 1956, it exploded on the screen, burning away years of Hollywood artifice, jump-starting the post-war American independent...Watch Movie
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Neighboring Sounds
One of the most acclaimed films of the year, NEIGHBORING SOUNDS is the thrilling debut from filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho. On a quiet block in the coastal city of Recife, ruled by an aging patriarch and his sons, a recent spate of petty crime has rattled the nerves of the...Watch Movie
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Dreams of a Life
Nobody noticed when thirty-eight year old Joyce Vincent died in her apartment in North London in 2003. Three years later when her skeleton was discovered, her heating and television were still on. Who was Joyce Vincent and how could her death have gone unnoticed for so long?...Watch Movie
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Where the Green Ants Dream
Werner Herzog's films have taken him from the jungles of Peru to the peaks of Himalayas to the sole human outpost in Antarctica in a quest to find landscapes to inspire him and the dreamers who embrace those lands. WHERE THE GREEN ANTS DREAM is the Australian outback,...Watch Movie
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Mock Up on Mu
Notorious Bay Area kino-renegade Craig Baldwin tops his earlier found-footage operas SPECTRES OF THE SPECTRUM and SONIC OUTLAWS with the rapid-fire pulp serial-cum-political-tract piss-take on California's major industrial complexes: military, entertainment and religious. Hitting upon everything...Watch Movie
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Concrete Night
A stunning, dream-like odyssey through a beautiful and otherworldly Helsinki over the course of one evening, CONCRETE NIGHT follows the impressionable fourteen-year-old Simo as he keeps his soon-to-be incarcerated brother company. The official Finnish submission to the Academy Awards® for Best...Watch Movie
