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...
When shy dork Lars overcomes his problems by adopting a life-size doll as his girlfriend, the event is treated seriously, rather than derisively, in this distinctly odd small town American community. The doll is treated as a celebrity, asked to parties, offered jobs as a teacher, nurse and, more appropriately, as a clothes model, events that open up Lars's own social horizon. Despite his mental short comings he still attracts fellow office worker Margo and the two seem well suited to each oth find out more...
Madalenna is a married woman who leads a respectable, socially acceptable life. Except at certain intervals in that life, when a childhood trauma produces amnesia. She is no longer the respectable married woman, but a gypsy possessed by a wild, free-living spirit. This, supposedly true story, is the most bonkers of all the melodramas that Gainsborough produced. Madonna of the Seven Moons abandons the usual British historical setting in favour of a highly stylised Florence, nominally set in th 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...