429 Movies Like Fight Club (1999) (Page 26)

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A documentary about the rise and fall of the Enron Corporation, the energy-trading and utilities conglomerate that gained worldwide attention in 2001 upon its headline-grabbing bankruptcy. Detailing the massive amount of fraud and malfeasance committed by the organization’s top executives, the film delves into the many intricate strategies and "special purpose” entities that were manufactured in order to hide enormous losses and debt from shareholders and the general public. It’s a fascinating and distressing examination of hubris and greed, with so many ethical considerations laid aside in the pursuit of financial gain. The film is as pertinent today as it was when it was released in 2005—perhaps even more so in this post-financial collapse era of increased distrust in corporate agendas.

Genre: Documentary

Actor: Al Kaseweter, Amanda Martin-Brock, Andrew Weissmann, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Barbara Boxer, Bethany McLean, Bill Clinton, Carol Coale, David Freeman, Dick Cheney, Gray Davis, Henry Waxman, Jim Chanos, John Beard, Joseph Dunn, Kevin Phillips, Loretta Lynch, Max Eberts, Peter Coyote, Peter Elkind, Philip Hilder, Reggie Dees II, Tim Belden

Director: Alex Gibney

Rating: Not Rated, R

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This documentary about the 2015 massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church explores key questions around faith, justice, and forgiveness. It situates the massacre – which left nine African American churchgoers dead – within a bigger picture, with Emanuel being the first-ever freestanding black church in Charleston, a city in South Carolina with a highly charged racial history.

The film’s strengths lie in the stories of those who lost loved ones in the massacre, and the miraculous forgiveness some of the survivors offered the 21-year-old white supremacist responsible for the attack. Above all, it is a story about the power of faith.

Genre: Crime, Documentary, Drama

Actor: Dylann Storm Roof

Director: Brian Ivie

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Notorious comic artist Robert (R.) Crumb is definitely the most well-adjusted member of his immediate family. Fairly early in this documentary we are introduced to his two sibling brothers (mom is briefly viewed as well) and it becomes apparent that his childhood was less than rosy. Crumb and his brothers drew mind-blowing comics as an escape from their chaotic childhood, but it was only R. who would turn his talents into a means of permanent escape, while his oldest brother remains at home with his mom and never leaves the house, and his youngest brother is holed up in a seedy residence hotel and spends his days sitting on a bed of nails (I kid you not.) Whether or not you’re a fan of Crumb’s work, this is an amazing documentary about an eccentric individual and the world of underground comics.

Genre: Comedy, Documentary

Actor: Aline Kominsky, Charles Crumb, Maxon Crumb, Robert Crumb, Robert Hughes

Director: Terry Zwigoff

Rating: R

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City Island is a lighthearted comedy/drama about the Rizzo family, residents of the titular fishing community in The Bronx, New York. Andy Garcia plays the patriarch of the family who works as a corrections officer, and who decides one day to bring home a young ex-con named Tony under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Tony soon becomes entwined in the dysfunctional household as he develops varying relationships with each family member, even as each of them lives their own secret life apart from the rest. This secrecy drives much of the plot, as their personal mysteries play out in an unexpected and often amusing ways. It’s a lively slice-of-life full of boisterous characters, comedic misunderstandings and ultimately a warm embrace of family unity.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Alan Arkin, Andy Garcia, Bettina Bresnan, Carrie Baker Reynolds, Chad Hessler, Chazz Menendez, Curtiss Cook, Damian Achilles, Daniel Maldonado, Dominik Garcia, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Emily Mortimer, Ezra Miller, Hallie Cooper-Novack, Hope Glendon-Ross, Ivy Jones, Jee Young Han, Julianna Margulies, Louis Mustillo, Louise Stratten, Lynn Collins, Marianne Ebert, Marshall Efron, Matthew Arkin, Mike Burke, Paul Diomede, Paul Marini, Paul Romero, Rick Aiello, Sarah Saltzberg, Sharon Angela, Steven Strait, Vernon Campbell, Yevgeniy Dekhtyar

Director: Raymond De Felitta

Rating: PG-13

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Incredible footage combined with a great soundtrack will keep you frozen in your seat until global warming melts you off (so to speak). Chasing Ice is about a National Geographic photographer who tries to capture a complete overview of what climate change is doing to our planet. Consequently this movie took years to make and countless technical issues had to be dealt with in order to record the time-lapse videos. The result is mesmerizing, and captures something that has never been caught on camera before. This movie is evidence of what our planet is going through that everyone can relate to. Be prepared to be charmed and saddened at the same time.

Genre: Documentary

Actor: Adam LeWinter, Dennis Dimick, James Balog, Jeff Orlowski, Kitty Boone, Louie Psihoyos, Svavar Jónatansson, Sylvia Earle, Tad Pfeffer

Director: Jeff Orlowski

Rating: PG-13

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With an ensemble cast featuring a young Natalie Portman and a less murderous Uma Thurman, Ted Demme's "Beautiful Girls" recreates the worries and woes that thrive in the minds of a tight knit group of working class friends stuck in their own small town Massachusetts world. Warm, quirky and filled with champagne diamonds, both metaphorical and tangible, for anybody who's ever walked the thirty something walk, it's a film that'll make you want to remember all the friends you wish you still had and actually still do.

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Adam LeFevre, Annabeth Gish, Anne Bobby, David Arquette, Frank Anello, John Carroll Lynch, John Scurti, Lauren Holly, Martha Plimpton, Matt Dillon, Max Perlich, Michael Rapaport, Mira Sorvino, Natalie Portman, Noah Emmerich, Oliver Osterberg, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Rachel Oliva, Richard Bright, Rosie O'Donnell, Sam Robards, Timothy Hutton, Tom Gibis, Tomas Settell, Uma Thurman

Director: Ted Demme

Rating: R

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You'd expect a film with a premise like this to make constant parallels between its two main storylines, or to at least have them intersect more often and more significantly. But impressively, Mast Mein Rehne Ka makes the jump from chance encounter to wandering slice-of-life drama with ease—becoming a portrait of Mumbai and the isolation that various people experience due to discrimination against their class, their age, or their gender. The film's tonal balance certainly isn't perfect, as the more lighthearted adventures of the widower begin to clash more severely with the literal life-or-death situations faced by the young would-be thief. But consistently solid filmmaking and heartfelt performances smooth over the rougher edges and the occasional bits of dramatic excess.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Abhishek Chauhan, Faisal Malik, Jackie Shroff, Mashhoor Amrohi, Monika Panwar, Neena Gupta, Priyadarshan Jadhav, Rakhi Sawant, Shashi Kiran, Uday Sabnis, Vijay Maurya

Director: Vijay Maurya

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Last Stop Larrimah is the rare true-crime doc in which not a single tear is shed throughout its substantial two-hour runtime. That’s because the assumed-dead 70-year-old around whom it's centered had a lot of enemies: nearly all of his neighbors in the titular tiny Outback outpost he lived in, in fact. As the doc reveals, Larrimah — population: 10 (11 before Paddy Moriarty disappeared in 2017) — was a pressure cooker of big personalities roiling with animosity. 

Given the town’s tiny population, the film has the uncommon privilege of being able to explore the potential motives of every possible suspect — and it does, diving into vicious feuds over meat pies, hungry pet crocodiles, and the million grievances Paddy’s neighbors apparently harbored. But, though it presents all motives as equally plausible, it turns out one explanation is much more likely than the rest. That’s the problem here: like so many other true-crime docs, by the end, you can’t help but feel that the journey this takes is ultimately exploitative. Though it’s an entertaining portrait of eccentric Aussie characters, the film is much too devoted to doing just that — entertaining — at the expense of all its participants (including the unremarkable local police, for some reason), and so its late pivot into emotional profundity feels markedly insincere.

Genre: Documentary

Director: Thomas Tancred

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The main subject that Hold Your Fire promises to be about—negotiation tactics first used in resolving a New York City standoff at a sporting goods store—is ultimately its most least interesting aspect. These supposed tactics aren't too well, and they end up putting a damper on all the human drama that comes before it, which proves strikingly three-dimensional. As the film revisits the details of the hostage situation from the perspective of those who were actually there, it also complicates the situation by compelling us to think of it in a dense, sociopolitical sense rather than a reductive lens of crime and punishment. It's this build-up to the actual negotiation that may actually hold more insight into these kinds of crises.

Genre: Documentary

Director: Stefan Forbes

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Big George Foreman ticks all the boxes of what a biopic should be. It shows us his troubled childhood, his bumpy rise to the top, and his eventual reconciliation with fame and boxing. It’s also nicely shot and polished, an accurately dressed period piece that looks and feels the part. But nothing about the film hits you as particularly new or exciting. Prickly topics like faith and infidelity aren’t so much explored as they are simply covered, and the dialogue sounds like something you’ve heard a thousand times. There’s also a sense that the filmmakers noticed this problem because halfway through, the movie switches into a more lighthearted tone, as if it were suddenly bored of itself. Sure, Big George Foreman is easy to follow and nice to look at, but its formulaic structure fails to distinguish itself from a long and ever-growing line of sports biopics.

Genre: Drama, History

Actor: Al Bernstein, Al Sapienza, Anthony Marble, Austin David Jones, Azaria Carter, Barry Hanley, Bill Martin Williams, Billy Slaughter, Brian Ibsen, Deion Smith, Deneen Tyler, Dwayne L. Barnes, Eric Hanson, Erica Tazel, Forest Whitaker, Greg Wattkis, Jasmine Mathews, John Magaro, Jonathan Mercedes, Joshua Wade, Judd Lormand, Julia Lashae, K. Steele, Kei, Khris Davis, Lara Grice, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Madison Dirks, Martin Bats Bradford, Matthew Glave, Matthew Rimmer, Michael Harrity, Michael Papajohn, Philip Fornah, Raion Hill, Robert Cicchini, Robert Larriviere, Sam Trammell, Samantha Beaulieu, Shein Mompremier, Sonja Sohn, Sullivan Jones, T.C. Matherne, Tom Virtue, Zephaniah Terry

Director: George Tillman Jr.

Rating: PG-13

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If you’ve ever been puzzled by “Greek life”, this documentary will go some way to demystifying that somewhat baffling phenomenon of American college culture. Bama Rush follows four hopefuls as they “rush” the University of Alabama’s sororities, a TikTok-viral weeklong recruitment process so cutthroat some candidates spend months preparing for it. The documentary digs deep into why these young women put so much time, energy, and money into joining what the film hints is a largely unforgiving and reductive element of campus life. What it finds is pretty affecting: they’re really just looking for acceptance and belonging.

Threaded throughout are director Rachel Fleit’s reflections on her own history with those motivations, having grown up with alopecia. Though it does illustrate that rushing isn’t so dissimilar from other quests for acceptance, this parallel is sometimes clunkily drawn — and can seem somewhat self-indulgent in places, given the documentary’s comparatively surface-level exploration of more systemic issues. A late development shifts Bama Rush into an even deeper self-reflexive mode, as the film itself becomes a contentious issue in the process it’s documenting. Despite its flaws, turns like this — and its participants’ extraordinary candor — help make Bama Rush an often illuminating look into an opaque world. 

Genre: Documentary, Drama

Director: Rachel Fleit

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There are a lot of laughs to be had in Prom Dates, most of them coming from the funny and actualized characterization of Hannah, the lead’s queer best friend. But everything else about this coming-of-age film feels too familiar and forced to be memorable. Despite leading the film, Jess feels like a hollow copy-paste version of all the delusional, ambitious leads in teen films like Booksmart, Superbad, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, except there’s nothing particularly insightful or likable about her. She comes across as the annoying classmate you know too much about, against your own will. Events unfold in more or less predictable ways, though it’s not hard to imagine that the film could be elevated by a more robust cast. As it is, Prom Dates is a fleeting, forgettable entry in an already stacked genre.

Genre: Comedy

Actor: Adam Herschman, Antonia Gentry, Arianna Rivas, Audrey Trullinger, Chelsea Handler, Emery Kelly, John Michael Higgins, Jordan Buhat, JT Neal, Julia Lester, Kenny Ridwan, Kiel Kennedy, Leonardo Cecchi, Patty Guggenheim, Shea Buckner, Terry Hu, Zión Moreno

Director: Kim O. Nguyen

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Loss can be straightforwardly heartwrenching, but it could also be bewildering, cryptic, and too sudden to even process. New Religion depicts a grieving mother, whose loss of her daughter, and her meet up with an eccentric photographer, causes her to behave strangely. The film goes through the events in a surreal, existential haze, with a skin-crawling scene that reveals the photographer’s nefarious reasons, but the sequences remain inscrutable and the themes and certain characters don’t mesh as well as they could have. New Religion might befuddle viewers just looking for a casual watch, but it’s definitely a thought provoking and promising debut from Keishi Kondo.

Genre: Drama, Horror

Actor: Daiki Nunami, Kaho Seto, Ryuseigun Saionji, Satoshi Oka, Yuki Nagata

Director: Keishi Kondo

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In Coup!, the servants of a wealthy, faux-progressive family in 1918 attempt to take over after realizing that the Spanish influenza has granted them leverage over their helpless masters. It’s a dark comedy that shares many similarities with the 2019 hit Parasite. Like the latter, Coup! is largely a film about class warfare, liberal hypocrisy, the devaluation of labor, and survival. It also showcases the endlessly entertaining Sarsgaard and Magnussen, who can make you feel vindicated in one second and squirmish in another. But there’s a missing ingredient in Coup! that makes it feel less like a satire than an imitation of it. Maybe it’s the lack of dedication to the darkness of its tone or the vague, frustrating way it resolves the tension between employees and employers. Perhaps it’s both. Either way, there are some delicious and thought-provoking morsels to be found in Coup!, but nothing filling or hearty to make it memorable enough.

Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Ali Wills, Billy Magnussen, Callum Vinson, Faran Tahir, Fisher Stevens, John Posey, Julia Ford Collier, Kristine Nielsen, Peter Sarsgaard, Sarah Gadon, Skye P. Marshall

Director: Austin Stark, Joseph Schuman

Rating: NR

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What seems like The Good Mother's biggest asset is actually its downfall. Yes, the three main actors (Swank, Cooke, and Jack Reynor as the civil servant son, Toby) are all good at what they do, but they're incapable of resuscitating a script that's never truly come to life. These casting choices, obviously made to give some clout to a very mediocre project, feel even more disappointing because the disconnect between actor and character is way too big. For example, Swank is not the alcoholic, fed-up mother we need her to be in this case, and its hard to see this as something else than a derogatory take on her previous more tender and glam roles. Director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte's Sundance-winning As You Are carried a whiff of fresh air, The Good Mother is drained out of all its energy, avoiding reflective depth at all costs, not to mention skirting around the ambivalences of motherhood. 

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Cliff Ware, Dilone, Frank Alfano, Hilary Swank, Hopper Penn, Jack Reynor, Karen Aldridge, Larry Fessenden, Laurent Rejto, Norm Lewis, Olivia Cooke

Director: Miles Joris-Peyrafitte

Rating: R

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