My Five All-Time Favorite Movies
1.Fearless
Adapted by screenwriter Rafael Yglesias from his own novel, Fearless explores the complex struggle back to mental health of post-traumatic stress disorder victim Max Klein (Jeff Bridges). One of few survivors of a fatal plane crash, Klein remains calm and assists other survivors out of the burning debris, earning praise as a hero by the media. After stoically departing the tragedy without a word to emergency officials, Max returns home with detached feelings towards his wife (Isabella Rossellini) and son, along with a bizarre, seemingly authentic belief that he is now impervious to harm. Bill Perlman (John Turturro), a psychiatrist for the airline, fails to reach Max about his newfound fearlessness, but asks for his help.
2. Man Facing Southeast
This Argentine film freshens up an old cinematic device: juxtaposing science fiction and religion. A Buenos Aires mental hospital is thrown into an uproar when a mysterious male patient appears out of nowhere. As the psychiatrists grill the stranger, he sticks to a story that suggests that his origins are far from earthly. In fact, if his seemingly supernatural powers are any proof, he may well be a space alien. Unable to comprehend the incomprehensible, the authorities decide to lock the visitor away from public view, maybe even put an end to his life--and the analogies to Christ and Christianity are lost on no one.
3. Magnolia
An intriguing and entertaining study in characters going through varying levels of crisis and introspection. This psychological drama leads you in several different directions, weaving and intersecting various subplots and characters, from a brilliant Tom Cruise, as a self-proclaimed pied-piper, to a child forced to go on a TV game show and the pressures he faces from a ruthless father.
4. My Architect
Louis Kahn, a giant among twentieth-century architects, left a legacy of brilliantly designed and engineered buildings that have a tough beauty and deep spirit. His work challenges us to discover an astonishing sensibility and poetry through light, space, and texture. Kahn's personal life was even more mysterious, and his death, alone and unidentified in Penn Station in 1974, revealed that he led not a double but a triple life, shuttling between his legitimate family and two women and the children they bore him. One of these, his son Nathaniel, takes us on a personal journey to consider the contradictions of this complicated genius and eccentric parent.
5. Breaking Away
This charming, Academy Award winner (1979, Screenplay) cycles high on comedy as four friends come to terms with life after high school. When top-notch cyclist Dave (Dennis Christopher) learns that the world's bicycling champions are always Italian, he attempts to turn himself into an Italian, driving his parents (Barbara Barrie, Paul Dooley) crazy. But everything changes after he meets the Italian racing team-an encounter that ultimately leads him and his friends (Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, Jackie Earle Haley) to challenge the local college boys in the town's annual bike race.
