Directed by Andrea Arnold • 2009 • United Kingdom
Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing
British director Andrea Arnold won the Cannes Jury Prize for the intense and invigorating FISH TANK, about a fifteen-year-old girl, Mia (electrifying newcomer Katie Jarvis), who lives with her mother and sister in the housing projects of Essex. Mia’s adolescent conflicts and emerging sexuality reach a boiling point when her mother’s new boyfriend (a lethally attractive Michael Fassbender) enters the picture. In her young career, Arnold has already proven herself to be a master of social realism, evoking the work of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach; and she invests her sympathetic portraits of dead-end lives with a poetic, earthy sensibility all her own. FISH TANK heralds the official arrival of a major new filmmaker.
Up Next in 21st Century Cinema
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Yi Yi
Directed by Edward Yang • 2000 • Taiwan, Japan
Starring Nianzhen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issey OgataThe extraordinary, internationally embraced YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginnin...
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The Piano Teacher
Directed by Michael Haneke • 2001 • France
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Benoît MagimelIn this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Academy Award–winning director Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world ...
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Old Joy
Directed by Kelly Reichardt • 2006 • United States
Starring Daniel London, Will OldhamTwo old friends reunite for a quietly revelatory overnight camping trip in this breakout feature from Kelly Reichardt, a microbudget study of character and masculinity that introduced many viewers to one of co...
