A guide to films that express social realism or escapism; and a guide to culturally important films that may reveal a character's thoughts, dreams, or motivations.
Image from Frances Ha from wifflegif.com at https://wifflegif.com/tags/300161-frances-ha-gifs
Image from Paradise: Hope from film-grab.com at https://film-grab.com/wp-content/uploads/photo-gallery/imported_from_media_libray/paradisehope029.jpg?bwg=1546961308
Image from Raw from bfi.org.uk at https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/raw-first-look
Image from Mommy from imdb.com at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3612616/mediaviewer/rm1289074945
Image from Booksmart from giphy.com at https://giphy.com/gifs/dILAfLJYPeb7YzgNOw
Image from The Diary of a Teenage Girl from film-grab.com at https://film-grab.com/wp-content/uploads/photo-gallery/imported_from_media_libray/teenagegirl059.jpg?bwg=1546979592
Image from Moonlight from giphy.com at https://giphy.com/gifs/a24-moonlight-barry-jenkins-l3vR8oZrkOevSjEJi
Image from Moonrise Kingdom from tenor.com at https://tenor.com/view/moonrise-kingdom-sam-suzy-halloweenparty-gif-15402708
Image from Fish Tank from rebloggy.com at http://rebloggy.com/post/gif-film-quote-movie-michael-fassbender-gifset-movie-gif-fish-tank-katie-jarvis/102099927658
Image from Persepolis from giphy.com at https://giphy.com/gifs/maudit-maudit-persepolis-marjane-satrapi-e6NMMdhV5Xrz2
Image form Aparajito from criterion.com at https://www.criterion.com/films/28443-aparajito
BooksmartTold from a wildly original, fresh, and modern perspective, this is an unfiltered comedy about high school best friends and the bonds they create that last a lifetime. Capturing the spirit of the times, it is a coming-of-age story for a new generation.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE BOOKSMART
ISBN: 0024543638810
Publication Date: 2019
BoyhoodA groundbreaking story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a boy named Mason, who ages from six to eighteen years old on screen.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE BOYHOOD
ISBN: 0032429208668
Publication Date: 2014
The Breakfast ClubFive high school students-- a Rebel, an Athlete, a Brain, a Princess and a Basketcase-- find themselves thrown together serving a Saturday morning detention. They do not have much in common, except giving up their day, sitting in the school library, and writing an essay for the principal. At first, they argue and hate each other, but after smoking some of the Rebel's marijuana, they begin to pour their hearts out to each other. They talk about their fears, secrets, deepest emotions, and problems.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE BREAKFAST
ISBN: 0025192274541
Publication Date: 1985
Call Me by Your NameIt's the summer of 1983 in Italy, and Elio, a precocious 17-year-old, spends his days in his family's villa transcribing and playing classical music, reading and flirting with his friend Marzia. One day, Oliver, a charming American scholar arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio's father, an eminent professor. Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will alter their lives forever.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE CALL
ISBN: 0043396523821
Publication Date: 2017
Dazed and ConfusedAmerica, 1976. The last day of school. Bongs blaze, bell-bottoms ring, and rock and roll rocks. Eavesdrop on a group of seniors-to-be and incoming freshman.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE DAZED
ISBN: 1559409827
Publication Date: 1993
The Diary of A Teenage GirlLike most teenage girls, Minnie Goetze is longing for love, acceptance and a sense of purpose in the world. Minnie begins a complex love affair with her mother's boyfriend, the handsomest man in the world, Monroe Rutherford. What follows is a sharp, funny and provocative account of one girl's sexual and artistic awakening, without judgment.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE DIARY
ISBN: 0043396462816
Publication Date: 2015
Eighth GradeThirteen-year-old Kayla endures the tidal wave of contemporary suburban adolescence as she makes her way through the last week of middle school (the end of her thus far disastrous eighth grade year) before she begins high school.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE EIGHTH
ISBN: 0031398292487
Publication Date: 2018
Frances HaA woman in her late twenties living in contemporary New York tries to sort out her ambitions, finances, and above all, her tight but changing bond with her best friend Sophie. Frances Ha gets at both the frustrations and the joys of being young and unsure of where to go next.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE FRANCES
Publication Date: 2012
George WashingtonOver the course of one hot summer, a group of children in rural North Carolina are forced to confront a tangle of difficult choices as they discover what it takes to make a modern American hero.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE GEORGE
ISBN: 0037429166123
Publication Date: 2000
The GraduateBenjamin Braddock has just finished college and is already lost in a sea of confusion and barely contained angst when he becomes sexually involved with the middle-aged mother of the young woman he's dating.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE GRADUATE
ISBN: 9781681431123
Publication Date: 1967
Lady BirdThe adventures of a young woman living in Northern California for a year.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE LADY
ISBN: 0031398277439
Publication Date: 2018
The Last Picture ShowA bittersweet drama of the social and sexual mores in small-town 1950s Texas.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE LAST
ISBN: 0043396504295
Publication Date: 1971
MoonlightA young black man struggles to find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE MOONLIGHT
ISBN: 0031398257363
Publication Date: 2016
Moonrise KingdomSet on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore, and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE MOONRISE
ISBN: 0025192115608
Publication Date: 2012
Rebel without a CauseJim Stark, a new kid in town whose loneliness, frustration and anger mirrored those of postwar teens, is still reverberating 50 years later. Though he finds some of this in his relation with Judy, and a form of it in both Plato's adulation and Ray's concern for him, Jim must still prove himself to his peers.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE REBEL
ISBN: 9781624040559
Publication Date: 1955
The Virgin Suicides"In the mid-1970s, in a sleepy Michigan community, live the Lisbon sisters, five teenagers whose beauty has bewitched a group of neighborhood boys. Isolated by their over-protective parents, they move like fleeting visions against the suburban landscape, luminous and unattainable. But when school hunk Trip Fontaine convinces Lux Lisbon and her sisters to go to the prom, the boys' romantic fantasies threaten to come true - until they are engulfed in a stunning chain of events that will change their lives forever."
Call Number: DVD MOVIE VIRGIN
ISBN: 9781681434292
Publication Date: 1999
35 Shots of RumLionel is a middle-aged widower who makes his living driving a train and shares an apartment with his twenty-something daughter Josephine. Lionel and Josephine have a warm and caring relationship. Lionel's on-and-off girlfriend Gabrielle and their footloose friend Noe live in the same building, and together the four have fallen into a casual family relationship. Lionel is on edge when Jospehine's friendship with Noe begins to evolve into a romantic relationship.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE 35
ISBN: 0881164000217
Publication Date: 2008
The 400 BlowsThe semi-autobiographical story of fourteen-year-old Antoine Doinel, portraying his aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime. Also includes the short film, Antoine and Colette, which originally appeared as part of the film L'amour à vingt ans, picking up Antoine's story a few years later, when he is living on his own and pursuing his first love affair, initiating a lifelong career of quixotic dreams and amorous restlessness.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE 400
ISBN: 0715515017527
Publication Date: 1959
AparajitoYoung Apu (Pinaki Sengupta), lives with his mother, Sarbajaya (Karuna Bannerjee), and father, Harihar (Karuna Bandyopadhyay), near the Ganges River. When Harihar dies suddenly, Apu and Sarbajaya move to a small village to be near relatives. Eventually, she reluctantly allows her son (now played by Smaran Ghosal) to attend school in Calcutta. As Apu acclimates to life in the city, Sarbajaya struggles with his absence.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE APARAJITO
Publication Date: 1956
Apur SansarApu Roy (Soumitra Chatterjee), now a young unemployed man, lives in poverty and attempts to be a writer. When his old school friend Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee) convinces him to go on a trip to a family wedding, surprising circumstances end in Apu marrying the bride, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore). Set on being a responsible husband, Apu finds a job and becomes close to his wife, but tragedy strikes, leaving him at yet another crossroads.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE APUR
Publication Date: 1959
BoyThe year is 1984, and on the rural east coast of New Zealand Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' is changing kids' lives. 'Boy' is a dreamer who lives with his brother Rocky and his Nan. When Boy's father, Alamein, returns home after seven years away, Boy is forced to confront the man he thought he remembered find his own potential, and learn to get along without the hero he had been looking for.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE BOY
ISBN: 0738329116729
Publication Date: 2010
A Brighter Summer DaySet in the early sixties in Taiwan, it is based on the true story of a crime that rocked the nation. A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centers on the gradual, inexorable fall of a young teenager.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE BRIGHTER
Publication Date: 1991
Casa GrandeA sharp social canvas of contemporary Brazil through the eyes of young Jean, who struggles with newfound knowledge of his racial and class privilege as he sweetly courts a mixed-race girl from a lower-ranked school than his and sows his oats with the family's maid.
Publication Date: 2014
Cría cuervos . . .Carlos Saura's exquisite Cría cuervos . . . heralded a turning point in Spain: shot while General Franco was on his deathbed, the film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy of fascism and its effects on a middle-class family (the title derives from the Spanish proverb: “Raise ravens and they’ll peck out your eyes”). Ana Torrent (the dark-eyed beauty from The Spirit of the Beehive) portrays the disturbed eight-year-old Ana, living in Madrid with her two sisters and mourning the death of her mother, whom she conjures as a ghost (an ethereal Geraldine Chaplin). Seamlessly shifting between fantasy and reality, the film subtly evokes both the complex feelings of childhood and the struggles of a nation emerging from the shadows.
Call Number: ESPANOL DVD PELICULA CRIA
ISBN: 0715515025225
Publication Date: 1976
El SurTen years after making his mark on Spanish cinema with The Spirit of the Beehive, Víctor Erice returned to filmmaking with this adaptation of a novella by Adelaida García Morales, which deepens the director’s fascination with childhood, fantasy, and the legacy of his country’s civil war. In the North of Spain, Estrella grows up captivated by her father, a doctor with mystical powers—and by the enigma of his youth in the South, a near-mythical region whose secrets haunt Estrella more and more as time goes on. Though Erice’s original vision also encompassed a section set in the South itself, scenes that were never shot, El Sur remains an experience of rare perfection and satisfaction, drawing on painterly cinematography by José Luis Alcaine to evoke the enchantments of memory and the inaccessible, inescapable mysteries of the past.
Call Number: ESPANOL DVD PELICULA SUR
ISBN: 0715515216517
Publication Date: 1983
Fish TankBritish director Andrea Arnold won the Cannes Jury Prize for this searing and invigorating film about a fifteen-year-old girl, Mia, who lives with her mother and sister in the depressed housing projects of Essex. Mia's adolescent conflicts and emerging sexuality reach boiling points when her mother's new boyfriend enters the picture.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE FISH
ISBN: 0715515064910
Publication Date: 2011
Good Morning/ Yasujirō OzuTwo young boys take a vow of silence after their parents refuse to buy them a television set for their suburban Tokyo home.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE GOOD
ISBN: 0715515198110
Publication Date: 1959
MommyA feisty widowed single mom finds herself burdened with the full-time custody of her explosive fifteen year old ADHD son. As they try to make ends meet and struggle with their unpredictable menage, the peculiar, new girl across the street, Kyla, benevolently offers her help. Together, they find a new sense of balance, and hope is regained.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE MOMMY
ISBN: 0031398217244
Publication Date: 2014
Pather PanchaliImpoverished priest Harihar Ray (Kanu Bannerjee), dreaming of a better life for himself and his family, leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work. Alone, his wife, Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), looks after her rebellious daughter, Durga (Uma Das Gupta), and her young son, Apu (Subir Bannerjee), as well as Harihar's elderly aunt Indir (Chunibala Devi). The children enjoy the small pleasures of their difficult life, while their parents suffer the daily indignities heaped upon them.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE PATHER
Publication Date: 1955
PersepolisIn 1970s Iran, Marjane 'Marji' Satrapi watches events through her young eyes and her idealistic family. Their long dream is realized when the hated Shah is defeated in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, Marji grows up to witness first hand how the new Iran has become a repressive tyranny on its own. With Marji dangerously refusing to remain silent at this injustice, her parents send her abroad to Vienna to study. This change proves an equally difficult trial for Marji and finds herself in a different culture loaded with abrasive characters and profound disappointments that deeply trouble her. Even when she returns home, Marji finds that both she and her homeland have changed too much and the young woman and her loving family must decide where she truly belongs.
Call Number: DVD ANIMATED PERSEPOLIS
ISBN: 1424883148
Publication Date: 2007
RawIn Justine's family everyone is a veterinarian and vegetarian. Sixteen-years-old, and an exceptional student, she is about to start studies at a veterinarian school where her older sister is also a student. But, she has barely arrived when the hazing starts. Justine is forced to eat raw meat. It is the first time in her life she has eaten meat of any kind. The consequences quickly make themselves felt, and Justine discovers her true nature.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE RAW
ISBN: 0025192396038
Publication Date: 2016
The Spirit of the BeehiveThe Criterion Collection is proud to present Victor Erice's THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (El espiritu de la colmena), widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian village in 1940, directly following the country's devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes haunted by her memory of it. Produced by one of cinema's most mysterious auteurs as Franco's long regime was nearing its end, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is both a bewitching portrait of a child's inner life and an elusive, cloaked meditation on a nation trapped under tyranny.
Call Number: ESPANOL DVD PELICULA ESPIRITU
ISBN: 1559409819
Publication Date: 1973
Tarde Para Murir Joven / Too Late to Die YoungChile 1990, at the end of Pinochet's dictatorship, a group of adolescents living in a commune, attempt to make sense of their own burgeoning desires and tangled relationships while the adults prepare for the first New Year's Eve under the promise of democracy.
Call Number: ESPANOL DVD PELICULA TARDE
ISBN: 0698452214634
Publication Date: 2018
Yi YiThe extraordinary, internationally embraced Yi Yi (A One and a Two . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-age father NJ’s tentative flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, the filmmaker deftly imbues every gorgeous frame with a compassionate clarity. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century.
Call Number: DVD MOVIE YI
ISBN: 0715515018623
Publication Date: 2000
Y Tu Mamá TambiénA pair of horny Mexico City teenagers from different classes who, after their girlfriends jet off to Italy for the summer, are bewitched by a gorgeous older Spanish woman they meet at a wedding. When she agrees to accompany them on a trip to a faraway beach, the three form an increasingly intense and sensual alliance that ultimately strips them both physically and emotionally bare.
Call Number: ESPANOL DVD PELICULA Y
ISBN: 9781604658750
Publication Date: 2001
Image from Yi Yi from filmcomment.com at https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/feeling-seen-edward-yangs-yi-yi/