Highest-Rated Movies about 'Complex Characters'

Drunken Angel (1948), Betty Fisher and Other Stories (2001), Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Citizen Kane (1941), Opening Night (1977), Sling Blade (1996), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Hud (1963) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Complex Characters movies.

#2. Betty Fisher and Other Stories (2001)

Storyline: Grieving after the death of her young son Joseph, novelist Betty Fisher (Sandrine Kiberlain) enters a dark depression. Hoping to bring her out of it, her mother Margot (Nicole Garcia) arranges to kidnap another child, Jose (Alexis Chatrian), to replace the son Betty lost. Although she knows it's wrong, Betty accepts Jose as her new son. Meanwhile, Jose's mother Carole (Mathilde Seigner) is looking for her son with the help of her boyfriend, Francois (Luck Mervil), and some of his cohorts.

Plot Keywords: drama, french film, psychological drama, family, tragedy, female protagonist, novel adaptation ...

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#4. Citizen Kane (1941)

Storyline: A group of reporters are trying to decipher the last word ever spoken by Charles Foster Kane, the millionaire newspaper tycoon: "Rosebud". The film begins with a news reel detailing Kane's life for the masses, and then from there, we are shown flashbacks from Kane's life. As the reporters investigate further, the viewers see a display of a fascinating man's rise to fame, and how he eventually fell off the top of the world.

Plot Keywords: classic film, american film, black and white, drama, mystery, nonlinear narrative, symbolism ...

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#5. Opening Night (1977)

Storyline: A young woman gets killed in an accident trying to meet her favorite actress Myrtle Gordon after a play. Then Myrtle Gordon felt responsible for the killing leading her down to an emotional crisis that interferes with her professional work as an actress.—Chemi González <chemi01@hotmail.com>

Plot Keywords: drama, psychological drama, female protagonist, show business, theater, midlife crisis, mental breakdown ...

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#6. Sling Blade (1996)

Storyline: A partially handicapped man named Karl is released from a mental hospital, about 20 years after murdering his mother and another person. Karl is often questioned if he will ever kill again, and he shrugs in response saying there is no reason to. Now out of the mental institution, Karl settles in his old, small hometown, occupying himself by fixing motors. After meeting a young boy named Frank, who befriends him, Karl is invited to stay at Frank's house with his mother Linda, who views Karl as a strange but kind and generous man. However, Linda's abusive boyfriend, Doyle, sees things differently in the way rules ought to be run- normally insulting Linda's homosexual friend Vaughan as well as Karl's disabilities, and having wild parties with his friends. As Karl's relationship with Frank grows, he is watchful of Doyle's cruel actions.

Plot Keywords: drama, crime, psychological, independent film, social outcasts, murder, redemption ...

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#7. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Storyline: Hannah, Holly, and Lee are adult sisters from a show business family, their boozy actress mother who still believes she's an ingénue that can attract any man she wants, despite still being married to the girls' father, Evan. Hannah, on her second marriage to a man named Elliot, a financial advisor, is the success of the family, taking a break from her acting career to raise her children. Everyone turns to her for advice, while she never talks to others about what she needs or feels. Her first husband, Mickey, is a comedy show writer and hypochondriac, who is going through a crisis as he mistakenly believes he will die soon without a clear belief, as a non-practicing Jew, of what will happen to him in the afterlife. Single Holly is the insecure flaky sister, a struggling and thus continually unemployed actress, who has just started a catering business with her actress friend April, in order to do something constructive with her life. In her own security, Hannah even set up Holly and ...

Plot Keywords: drama, comedy, romance, family, new york, intellectual, marriage ...

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#8. Hud (1963)

Storyline: Hud Bannon is a ruthless young man who tarnishes everything and everyone he touches. Hud represents the perfect embodiment of alienated youth, out for kicks with no regard for the consequences. There is bitter conflict between the callous Hud and his stern and highly principled father, Homer. Hud's nephew Lon admires Hud's cheating ways, though he soon becomes aware of Hud's reckless amorality to bear him anymore. In the world of the takers and the taken, Hud is a winner. He's a cheat, but, he explains "I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner."

Plot Keywords: western, drama, family conflict, moral dilemma, father-son relationship, antihero, black and white ...

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#9. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (1996)

Storyline: Based on the classic novel by Daniel Defoe, this film adaptation relates the trouble-filled tale of Moll Flanders (Alex Kingston), a young British woman who goes from housemaid to mistress to wife to widow in relatively quick succession. Using deception to her advantage, Moll subsequently becomes involved with a number of men, including the shifty Jemmy Seagrave (Daniel Craig), always seeking financial wealth. Eventually, Moll's scheming ways lead her into some very uncomfortable situations.

Plot Keywords: adventure, drama, historical, romance, crime, female protagonist, british ...

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#10. Short Cuts (1993)

Storyline: While helicopters overhead spray against a Medfly infestation a group of Los Angeles lives intersect, some casually, some to more lasting effect. Whilst they go out to concerts and jazz clubs and even have their pools cleaned, they also lie, drink, and cheat. Death itself seems never to be far away, even on a fishing trip.—Jeremy Perkins {J-26}

Plot Keywords: drama, american, multi-narrative, black comedy, ensemble cast, los angeles, everyday life ...

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#11. Capturing the Friedmans (2003)

Storyline: In the late 1980's, the Friedmans - father and respected computer and music teacher Arnold Friedman, mother and housewife Elaine Friedman, and their three grown sons, David Friedman, Seth Friedman and Jesse Friedman - of Great Neck, Long Island, are seemingly your typical middle class American family. They all admit that the marriage was by no means close to being harmonious - Arnold and Elaine eventually got divorced - but the sons talk of their father, while also not being always there for them, as being a good man. This façade of respectability masks the fact that Arnold was buying and distributing child pornography. Following a sting operation to confirm this fact, the authorities began to investigate Arnold for sexual abuse of the minor-aged male students of his computer classes, which he held in the basement of the family home. Based on interviews with the students, not only was Arnold charged with and ultimately convicted of multiple counts of sodomy and sexual abuse of these boys but so was eighteen year old Jesse, who was mentioned by many as the aggressor of the two in the acts. Arnold admitted that he is a pedophile, but that he did not abuse the boys in his class as charged and convicted. The trial process brought out the dysfunction that previously existed within the family. But the issue of Arnold and Jesse's guilt of these acts is hotly debated among the family, among the authorities, among the media and among the students of the computer classes.—Huggo

Plot Keywords: documentary, true crime, family drama, legal drama, psychological, controversial, interviews ...

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#12. Hamlet (1996)

Storyline: Hamlet (Sir Kenneth Branagh), son of the King of Denmark (Brian Blessed), is summoned home for his father's funeral and his mother Gertrude's (Julie Christie's) wedding to his uncle Claudius (Sir Derek Jacobi). In a supernatural episode, he discovers that his uncle, who he hates anyway, murdered his father. In an incredibly convoluted plot, the most complicated and most interesting in all literature, he manages to (impossible to put this in exact order) feign (or perhaps not to feign) madness, murder the "Prime Minister", love and then unlove an innocent who he drives to madness, plot and then unplot against the uncle, direct a play within a play, successfully conspire against the lives of two well-meaning friends, and finally take his revenge on the uncle, but only at the cost of almost every life on-stage, including his own and his mother's.

Plot Keywords: shakespeare, tragedy, drama, kenneth branagh, classic literature, revenge, betrayal ...

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#13. Nashville (1975)

Storyline: Five days in the Nashville country and gospel music scene, filled with stars, wannabe stars, and other hangers-on - individual stories of this small group intertwined - provides a commentary on American society. The stars include: good ol' boy Haven Hamilton, whose patriotic songs leading up to the American bicentennial belie his controlling and ruthless nature; Barbara Jean, the country music darling who is just returning to Nashville and performing following recovery from a fire-related injury which may have taken more of an emotional toll than a physical one; and good looking and charismatic Tom Frank, one-third of the successful group Bill, Mary, and Tom, he who is trying to go solo, which masks his need to not be solo in his personal life as he emotionally abuses woman after woman in love with him, including Mary who is married to Bill. The wannabe stars include: Albuquerque, whose real name is Winifred, who is trying to run away from her husband Star in he not approving of her ...

Plot Keywords: musical, drama, usa, 1970s, politics, country music, multi-narrative ...

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#14. 21 Grams (2003)

Storyline: This is the story of three well-meaning but flawed people: Paul Rivers, an ailing mathematician lovelessly married to an English émigré; Christina Peck, an upper-middle-class suburban housewife, happily married homemaker with two young daughters, with hiding a secret past; and Jack Jordan, an ex-convict who has found in his Christian faith the strength to live a law-abiding life and raise a family. They will be brought together by a terrible accident that will change their lives. By the final frame, none of them will be the same as they will have learnt harsh truths about love, faith, courage, desire and guilt, and how chance can change our worlds irretrievably, forever.

Plot Keywords: drama, crime, thriller, tragedy, psychological, nonlinear narrative, family ...

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#15. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

Storyline: A liberated young schoolteacher at an Edinburgh girls' school in the period between the two world wars, instructs her girls on the ways of life. Ignoring the more mundane subjects, she teaches them of love, politics and art. Her affairs with two male teachers become known and she finds herself fighting to keep her job. She believes that she can always count on the one hundred percent support of her favorite pupils, but one of them does not feel that Miss Jean Brodie (Dame Maggie Smith) is in her "prime" anymore. No longer swayed by her teacher's eloquence, she begins to learn about life and love herself.—Rhino <rhino@blueyonder.co.uk>

Plot Keywords: education, female coming-of-age, scotland, 1930s, teacher, teacher-student relationship, mind control ...

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