78th Golden Globe Awards

At 7:40 PM, on October 26, 1979, South Korea’s President Park Chung-hee was assassinated by Kim Jae-gyu, director of the KCIA (Korean Central Intelligence Agency, thereby ending an 18- year long dictatorship. The Man Standing Next dramatizes the 40 days leading up to the murder.

Directed by Vadim Perelman and written by Ilya Zofin, Persian Lessons is a classic survivor story. Set in occupied France in 1942, Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is arrested by SS soldiers alongside other Jews and sent to a camp in Germany.

“There are three kinds of people: the ones above, the ones below, and the ones who fall”, says the actor who serves as a lead as well as narrator at the beginning of The Platform. He is speaking to his cell-mate, where the two are imprisoned in a large tower-style building, a vertical prison with one cell per floor, with two occupants per cell.

The viewer of the political thriller The Man Standing Next is asked to delve into one of South Korea’s most intricate moments of its modern history. A moment when one dictator falls only to be replaced by another.

It seems the criminal justice system is not unfairly skewed towards the white and rich only in the United States but in other countries as well. The story of Crímenes de Familia, the original title of this Argentine film, centers on two court cases happening to the same household in Buenos Aires.

Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil is a heart-wrenching outcry against the death penalty practices in Iran. It deals with the subject from the point of view of citizens who become the unintentional executioners, usually soldiers, and who are forced in this position.

There are so many stories from World War II, most of them told from the victims’ side and many of them based on true testimonies. But rarely do we see one from a child’s perspective and even more so, one that does not take place in one of the concentration camps with names that we are all too familiar with.

Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior is a biographical period action film set in the 17th.

Xiao Yuegui (Yu Nan) is the eponymous character, the aging companion of crime lord Yu Qiyang (Rhydian Vaughan). A flashback explains that she used to be the concubine of two mobster bosses who were a generation older.

Something of an Italian comedy Lebanese-style, C-Section is a screwball and endearing feel-good movie from Lebanon. Directed by 28-year-old David Oryan, it plays almost entirely inside an upscale clinic in Beirut.