Late Marriage

Late Marriage is a 2001 Israeli film about a 31-year-old bachelor Georgian-Israeli Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University whose family is trying to arrange a marriage for him, within the Georgian community. Unknown to them, he is secretly dating a 34-year-old divorcée, Judith (Ronit Elkabetz), who has a 6-year-old daughter. When his parents violently intervene, Zaza must choose between his family traditions or his love.(wikipedia)

Set in Isreal, Late Marriage, the first film from director Dover Koshashvili, follows the exploits of a displaced Georgian family as they attempt to arrange the marriage of their 31-year old son. What begins as a quirky comedy of errors, with Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi), its protagonist, placed in awkward situations due to his relatives’ insistence that he needs a wife posthaste, slowly becomes something more harrowing as the realization that more that just his own happiness is at stake grows unavoidable. The principles of the family are based on a dogma that lies somewhere between religious conviction, tradition, and pure stubbornness, and as a result, there’s apparently little room for them to budge, especially when the real reason for the son’s reluctance to marry is revealed. The father says, “We follow our head, not our heart,” but there are obviously emotional stakes to be considered here. As such, the film manages to tweak many sensitive issues during its running time, even if it’s hard to shake the feeling that such ado is excessive, considering the circumstances. (The Movie Martyr)

21 Grams

The movie interweaves several plot lines, around the consequences of a tragic automobile accident. Penn plays a critically ill academic mathematician, Watts plays a grief-stricken mother, and del Toro plays an born-again Christian ex-convict whose faith is sorely tested in the aftermath of the accident.
The 'R' Rated movie is presented in a non-linear arrangement where the lives of the characters are depicted before and after the accident. The three main characters each have 'past', 'present' and 'future' story threads, which are shown as non-linear fragments that punctuate elements of the overall story, all imminently coming toward each other and coalescing as the story progresses. (wikipedia)

Like few films in recent memory, 21 Grams fully reveals what it is to be human in the clutches of life's most challenging moments (IMDB).

Lost in Translation

A comedy drama film, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, centers on Bob Harris (Murray), an American action movie star on the downward slope of his career, who has come to Tokyo, Japan to film a whiskey commercial. He meets Charlotte (Johansson), a young woman married to a self-centered celebrity photographer, and the two share an unconsummated romance, perhaps more of a friendship, while exploring the cultural life of Tokyo. On its surface, Lost in Translation is a movie about culture shock between East and West, yet this reveals itself as a metaphor for more existential themes of alienation and loneliness and, alternatively, companionship. The film explores how these themes combine at certain stages in life, against the background of highly modern Japanese cityscapes. (wikipedia)

400 Blows

Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (1959) is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent. Inspired by Truffaut's own early life, it shows a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. Adults see him as a troublemaker. We are allowed to share some of his private moments, as when he lights a candle before a little shrine to Balzac in his bedroom. The film's famous final shot, a zoom in to a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera. He has just run away from a house of detention, and is on the beach, caught between land and water, between past and future. It is the first time he has seen the sea. (roger ebert)

The Brown Bunny

"A gentle, lyrical road movie" (salon.com)

“an uncommonly sensitive film that, while still far from being great, is certainly no unmitigated disaster…. a simple, affecting story about one man’s desperate attempt to regain a lost love… Though it’s quite apparent that The Brown Bunny isn’t tailor-made for mass audiences, it contains enough emotional purity that deserves much more respect than it’s been getting” (moviemartyr.com)

The Brown Bunny, the legendary (for all the wrong reasons) second film by writer-director-editor-producer-etc., Gallo, is a meditative, heartbreaking exploration of isolation, loneliness and loss. Gallo's film, notorious for its non-simulated oral sex act by Chloe Sevigny…(The Film Journal)

Koyaanisqatsi

Godfrey Reggio's debut as a film director and producer, is the first film of the QATSI trilogy. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance." Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds -- urban life and technology versus the environment.

Godfrey Reggio himself on the film:

KOYAANISQATSI attempts to reveal the beauty of the beast! We usually perceive our world, our way of living, as beautiful because there is nothing else to perceive. If one lives in this world, the globalized world of high technology, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another. In our world the "original" is the proliferation of the standardized. Copies are copies of copies. There seems to be no ability to see beyond, to see that we have encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has remarkably replaced the original, nature itself. We do not live with nature any longer; we live above it, off of it as it were. Nature has become the resource to keep this artificial or new nature alive.

That being said, my intention in-other-words, let me describe the bigger picture. KOYAANISQATSI is not so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value. KOYAANISQATSI is, after all, an animated object, an object in moving time, the meaning of which is up to the viewer. Art
has no intrinsic meaning. This is its power, its mystery, and hence, its attraction. Art is free. It stimulates the viewer to insert their own meaning, their own value. So while I might have this or that intention in creating this film, I realize fully that any meaning or value KOYAANISQATSI might have comes exclusively from the beholder. The film's role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the
experience of the encounter. The encounter is my interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then propaganda and advertising is the form. So in the sense of art, the meaning of KOYAANISQATSI is whatever you wish to make of it.

This is its power.

Goodbye Lenin!Set in East Berlin at the time of the fall of the wall and the reunification of Germany, Good Bye Lenin! tells the story of a young man whose arrest at a protest coincides with his model socialist mother having a heart attack and slipping into a coma. Eight months later the wall no longer exists, East and West Germany are united and the mother wakes up. Warned that any excitement could kill her, the young man along with his slightly less eager sister throws himself into recreating East Germany in his mother’s apartment. Through the main plot device of Alex’s deception, Good Bye Lenin! skilfully and often humorously explores how this period of great excitement, uncertainty, trepidation and promise affected ordinary people whose lives were turned upside down overnight.

La Mala educación

One of Spanish master filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s best, most complex, and most daring films, La Mala educación (Bad Education) twists all the conventions of the film noir genre to deliver an intelligent, touching, and quite disturbing film that works as a psychological study of shattered minds, as an indictment against hypocrisy and abuse of power, and as a vivid demonstration of the director’s love for the art of cinema.( Alternative Film Guide)

…..about two reunited childhood friends (and lovers) in the vein of an Alfred Hitchcock murder mystery. Sexual abuse by Catholic priests, transsexuality, drug abuse, and a metafiction are also important themes and devices in the plot(Wikipedia)

Rated NC-17 for a scene of explicit sexual content including semi-explicit depictions of gay sex

Y tu mamá también

In Mexico, two teenage boys and an attractive older woman embark on a road trip and learn a thing or two about life, friendship, sex, and each other. (IMDB)

literally "And your mother, too", is a 2001 Mexican film directed by Alfonso Cuarón. A coming-of-age story about the road trip of two teenage boys with a woman in her late twenties, the film is set against the backdrop of the political and economic realities of present-day Mexico, specifically at the end of the uninterrupted seventy-year line of Mexican presidents from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and the rise of the opposition headed by Vicente Fox. The film was a critical success, garnering awards such as the Venice Film Festival best screenplay award

It was also a runner-up for the National Society of Film Critics Awards for Best Picture and Best Director and was nominated for the 2002 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay. (wikipedia)

Rated R for strong sexual content involving teens, drug use and language.