
MARTYNAS and VYTARAS are two friends who seem to have it all - loving families, successful careers and considerable renown. Their TV show tops the ratings, their books sell like hot cakes, and their lives seem like a dream come true. But in reality they are just two stressed-out men, each trying to cope with his own version of a mid-life crisis. When Vytaras decides to leave everything behind and relocate to India for good, Martynas sets off on a mission to bring his pal home, at any cost. Suddenly the two friends find themselves stuck in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from civilization. Crammed in a car as old as the hills with a hyperactive Indian guide named Vasu, Martynas and Vytaras are forced to overcome culture shock as well as the nightmarish Indian roads to find their way home, before their insecurities and self-pity destroy their friendship.
In Deaf, the Spanish director Eva Libertad explores pregnancy and motherhood from the perspective of a deaf woman. Her movie examines how the world imposes the notion of disability on her main character while she actually does not feel disabled herself.
A decade since it aired, Shameless (U.S.) has always stuck to its guns (and baseball bats) about character diversity.
The film is a simple love story reminiscent of stories like The Notebook released in 2004. Sylvie and Robert are rarely actually together in the film, however; time and circumstance keep them away from each other, and the audience waits with bated breath to see them find one another over and over.
What seems like such a simple story of survival is so much more than that—it’s a story of family, and of war, and of destruction. It’s painful to watch, but not in a bad way. It makes its audience reflect on their own actions, and in how they are complicit in the sufferings of others as the adults in this film are. Grave of the Fireflies does not hold back from being heartbreaking, and it shouldn’t. It tells a message that needs to be heard decades after the war, and a story that cannot be forgotten by history.