Peter Yates' Oscar-winner is a heart-warming coming-of-age story that has also taken its place as the greatest sports movie about cycling ever made. Four friends graduate from high-school and find themselves looking at an uncertain future in small-town America. Dave's passion is cycling and his dream is to be a world-class champion like the Italians he idolises. His passion for cycling takes on new meaning when he and his friends face a team from the local college in the town's annual bike ra find out more...
Lucille (Andrea Burchill) and Ruth (Sara Walker) come to live with their off-the-wall Aunt Sylvie (Christine Lahti) after their mother kills herself. From sleeping on park benches to methodically stacking tin cans into pyramids, Sylvie's quirks are at first hard to get used to. While Ruth eventually grows fond of the woman's irrepressible spirit, Lucille starts to resent her aunt's behaviour -- especially find out more...
Thomas Beale says: "Aki Kaurismaki returns from a 4 year break with this French comedy-drama about an old age shoe shiner who shelters an illegal immigrant, unbeknownst to his sick wife. Le Havre has a wonderful sort of charm to it, with an underlying dry wit and, frankly, lovely cinematography (no, I can’t think of another word to describe it). There’s a level of emotional distance, though, and it lacks the tension that Kaurismaki is normally find out more...
A young teacher in modern Bhutan, Ugyen, shirks his duties while planning to go to Australia to become a singer. As a reprimand, his superiors send him to the most remote school in the world, a glacial Himalayan village called Lunana, to complete his service. He finds himself exiled from his Westernized comforts after an arduous 8 day trek just to get there. There he finds no electricity, no textbooks, not even a blackboard. Though poor, the villagers extend a warm welcome to their new teache find out more...
Adam Elliot's follow-up to his short opus 'Harvie Krumpet' is a tour-de-force of jaw-dropping animation, heart-wrenching beauty and exquisite sadness. Ostensibly, it's a tale of friendship between two pen pals; Mary, a lonely eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year-old obese man living in New York and suffering from Asperger's syndrome. The depth of pathos in their quasi-romantic exchanges becomes unbearable at times, but the expertly nuanced narrati find out more...