In this 2002 feature the people who live in Kabala, on the desert's edge in Mali, are locked in tradition and superstition, insisting on arranged marriages and condemning the protagonist when he's revealed to be the illegitimate son of a “witch.” He's forced to leave but returns four years later when cholera strikes the village and the elders refuse to clean the village's well, calling it the “well of our ancestors.” Director Assane Kouyate's fascinating story was inspired by a true incident, but his film is a bit too loosely structured.
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Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan and his real-life wife, Jaya, are paired on-screen for the first time in 20 years in this 2001 melodrama by Karan Johar.
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Kabir Khan wrote and directed this 2006 adventure film about two Indian TV reporters, an American photojournalist, and their Afghan guide, who encounter a Pakistani member of the Taliban in post-9/11 Afghanistan.
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Born in Afghanistan but educated in the West, Sedika Mojadidi returned to her homeland in early 1996 to record the aftermath of the decade-long Soviet-backed civil war; with the Taliban in power she had to wear a veil and often film clandestinely, interviewing people in the countryside and on the streets of Jalalabad and other towns.
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This Swiss drama of Holocaust survivors, directed by Beatrice Michel and Hans Sturm in collaboration with Villi Hermann, is slow, ponderous, wordy—and very moving.
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A rabbi's son is pressured to end his childless marriage (“A man who dies without progeny rips a page from the Torah”), his wife of ten years is still hopeful they'll conceive, and her sister is in love with a musician but betrothed to a scholar.
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A rabbi's son is pressured to end his childless marriage (“A man who dies without progeny rips a page from the Torah”), his wife of ten years is still hopeful they'll conceive, and her sister is in love with a musician but betrothed to a scholar.
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This computer-animated fantasy from France (2003) lifts its setting (a cosmically huge tree that stretches between two planets) from Brian Aldiss's classic sci-fi novel Hothouse and should have taken its plot from there too.
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Steven Soderbergh's 1991 follow-up to Sex, Lies, and Videotape suffers from a dumb screenplay written more than a decade earlier by Lem Dobbs and subsequently tinkered with by others.
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