41 Movies Like Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) On Itunes Canada (Page 3)

The only Kundera film adaptation frankly hasn’t disproven that the source novel is unfilmable, but The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a pretty decent attempt. While Kundera’s meditations aren’t tackled in full depth, director Philip Kaufman manages to retain enough of the novel’s images to rein in the unwieldy plot, such as Sabina with the mirror, Tereza’s nightmare of naked women, their photography around Sabina’s studio and the black-and-white moment of Prague Spring, where editor Walter Murch adeptly inserts Tereza and Tomas within the historical footage. These images, along with the excellent cast, keep the wistful feeling that haunts Kundera’s novel.

Genre: Drama, Romance

Actor: Anne Lonnberg, Bruce Myers, Clovis Cornillac, Consuelo De Haviland, Daniel Day-Lewis, Daniel Olbrychski, Derek de Lint, Donald Moffat, Erland Josephson, Jacques Ciron, Juliette Binoche, László Szabó, Lena Olin, Leon Lissek, Pascale Kalensky, Pavel Landovský, Pavel Slabý, Stellan Skarsgård, Tomasz Borkowy, Vladimír Valenta

Director: Philip Kaufman

Rating: R

This Dutch movie is a wonderful family story about a young boy who meets a peculiar girl while on vacation. He helps her find out more about her father who she has never met.

In its essence, this story is an uplifting coming-of-age story, not only because it was based on a young adult novel by Dutch writer Anna Woltz, but also because of a Moonrise-Kingdom-like staging. But like all great movies of its kind, it carries an emotional twist that packs enough depth even for not the not so young adult. 

Genre: Drama, Family

Actor: Guido Pollemans, Hans Dagelet, Jennifer Hoffman, Johannes Kienast, Josephine Arendsen, Julian Ras, Sonny Coops van Utteren, Suzan Boogaerdt, Terence Schreurs, Tjebbo Gerritsma

Director: Steven Wouterlood

Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, The Town, Arrival) plays Gary Webb, a journalist in investigating the American government’s possible involvement in cocaine trafficking in Latin America. Based on a true story, it’s in the same vein as other recent movies on investigative journalism. Jeremy Renner’s performance is the main reason to watch this movie. Even as the story spins into deeper levels of complexity, he remains a coherent, steady point of reference. It was his chance to prove to directors that he can carry a big-budget movie and he nailed it.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Andy Garcia, Barry Pepper, Dan Futterman, David Alessi, David de Vries, David Lee Garver, Gil Bellows, Jen Harper, Jena Sims, Jeremy Renner, Joshua Close, Lucas Hedges, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Matt Lintz, Matthew Lintz, Michael Cuesta, Michael Kenneth Williams, Michael Sheen, Nancy Davis Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Oliver Platt, Paz Vega, Ray Liotta, Rhoda Griffis, Richard Schiff, Robert Patrick, Robert Pralgo, Rosemarie DeWitt, Shaira Barton, Steve Coulter, Susan Walters, Tim Blake Nelson, Yul Vazquez

Director: Michael Cuesta

Rating: R

This original comedy-drama is about a young man on the autism spectrum called Luke. Propelled by a scandalous grandpa with no filters, Luke decides that what he needs in his life is to lose his virginity.

His dysfunctional family setting, which includes a mother who left him and a neurotic step-mother, makes his search more difficult but more also pressing. Luke decides he first has to get a job, and with a world that doesn’t expect much from him, his unbreakable determination is a joy to watch.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Al Sapienza, Ann Holloway, Art Hindle, Cary Elwes, Dewshane Williams, Jayne Eastwood, John Boylan, Kenneth Welsh, Kristin Bauer, Kristin Bauer van Straten, Lisa Ryder, Lou Taylor Pucci, Mackenzie Munro, Michael Kinney, Pam Hyatt, Sabryn Rock, Seth Green, Zoë Belkin

Director: Alonso Mayo

Rating: Not Rated

The level of access that A Thousand Cuts gets to both the side of the press and of the administration is ultimately what makes it valuable. By being on the ground with journalists doing honest-to-goodness hard work, the film reframes Duterte's war on drugs (really a campaign to terrorize the poor into submission) as an information war between news outlets and government propaganda. Unfortunately, in the process, the film also winds up excluding the voices of working class people and how they both engage and are engaged by all this information. There should be a way to honor the work of these journalists without accidentally positioning them above the public they serve.

Genre: Documentary

Actor: Amal Clooney, George Clooney, Leni Robredo, Maria Ressa, Patricia Evangalista, Pia Ranada

Director: Ramona S. Diaz

A fascinating kernel of certainty is padded out with giddy speculation in this documentary about a pair of unlikely art thieves. The facts are as such: 32 years after a $160 million painting by abstract artist Willem de Kooning was crudely cut from its frame in an Arizona gallery, a trio of small-town antique dealers discovered it in Jerry and Rita Alter’s estate sale. The Thief Collector is less interested in the painting itself  — in fact, it's openly dismissive about its artistic value — and more curious about how it fell into the hands of the mysterious couple, who frequently took exotic trips around the world despite their modest teacher incomes.

There are certainly intriguing questions raised by the Alters’ possession of the painting and compelling evidence that places them as the thieves, but this documentary can’t offer any convincing original theses of its own. It does try, by suggesting that the short stories Jerry wrote — about more thefts and gorier crimes — were thinly disguised autobiographical recollections, but it finds nothing to back these theories up except for a few loosely relevant anecdotes from relatives. With too many what-ifs to go on, it all makes for an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying deep dive.

Genre: Crime, Documentary, Drama

Actor: Glenn Howerton, Sarah Minnich, Scott Takeda

Director: Allison Otto