Sunset Blvd. (1950), Rear Window (1954), Le Samouraï (1967), The Devils (1971), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), Lacombe, Lucien (1974), Whistle Down the Wind (1962), Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Secretly Observing movies.
Storyline: In Hollywood of the 50's, the obscure screenplay writer Joe Gillis is not able to sell his work to the studios, is full of debts and is thinking in returning to his hometown to work in an office. While trying to escape from his creditors, he has a flat tire and parks his car in a decadent mansion in Sunset Boulevard. He meets the owner and former silent-movie star Norma Desmond, who lives alone with her butler and driver Max Von Mayerling. Norma is demented and believes she will return to the cinema industry, and is protected and isolated from the world by Max, who was her director and husband in the past and still loves her. Norma proposes Joe to move to the mansion and help her in writing a screenplay for her comeback to the cinema, and the small-time writer becomes her lover and gigolo. When Joe falls in love for the young aspirant writer Betty Schaefer, Norma becomes jealous and completely insane and her madness leads to a tragic end.
Plot Keywords: butler, madness, recluse, hollywood california, actress, delusion, comeback ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Professional photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies breaks his leg while getting an action shot at an auto race. Confined to his New York apartment, he spends his time looking out of the rear window observing the neighbors. He begins to suspect that a man across the courtyard may have murdered his wife. Jeff enlists the help of his high society fashion-consultant girlfriend Lisa Freemont and his visiting nurse Stella to investigate.
Plot Keywords: dog, amateur detective, broken leg, apartment, voyeur, wheelchair, neighbor ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Hitman Jef Costello is a perfectionist who always carefully plans his murders and who never gets caught. One night however, after killing a night-club owner, he's seen by witnesses. His efforts to provide himself with an alibi fail and more and more he gets driven into a corner.
Plot Keywords: neo noir, police lineup, detective, very little dialogue, paris france, nightclub, based on novel ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Cardinal Richelieu and his power-hungry entourage seek to take control of seventeenth-century France, but need to destroy Father Grandier - the priest who runs the fortified town that prevents them from exerting total control. So they seek to destroy him by setting him up as a warlock in control of a devil-possessed nunnery, the mother superior of which is sexually obsessed by him. A mad witch-hunter is brought in to gather evidence against the priest, ready for the big trial.
Plot Keywords: priest, exorcism, devil, hanging, religion, convent, execution ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: With a strange and powerful obsession stemming from a pampered childhood during the tumultuous years of the Mexican Revolution, the affluent bachelor and suave ceramist, Archibaldo de la Cruz, oscillates effortlessly between fantasy and reality, desire and hallucination. Compelled to taste again and again the delicious fruit of depravity that triggers an intense dark satisfaction, Archibaldo won't shy away from using one of his many shave-ready straight razors, bent on going to great lengths to quench his lust. Undoubtedly, death encircles the scheming Archibaldo, and the targets are always innocent women; however, is he truly capable of murder?—Nick Riganas
Plot Keywords: dark comedy, confession, music box, black comedy, mexican revolution, wealthy man, childhood memory ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: A small town in the south-west of France, summer of 1944. Having failed to join the resistance, the 18 year old Lucien Lacombe, whose father is a prisoner in Germany and whose mother dates her employer, works for the German police. He then meets France Horn, the daughter of a rich jewish tailor.—Vincent Merlaud <merlaud@studi.mathematik.hu-berlin.de>
Plot Keywords: france, year 1944, collaborator, based on true story, french resistance, occupation, moral ambiguity ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Little Kathy (Hayley Mills) discovers a man wanted for murder hiding in her family's barn. When she asks him who he is, he says Jesus Christ just before he goes unconscious. Kathy and her siblings are convinced that he is Jesus, and try to hide him from grown-ups.—Nasser <NasKU@aol.com>
Plot Keywords: farm, directorial debut, fugitive, coming of age, based on novel, manipulative man, pretending to be someone else ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Celestine, the chambermaid, has new job on the country. The Monteils, who she works for are a group of strange people. The wife is frigid, her husband is always hunting (both animals and women) and her father is a shoe-fetishist. Joseph, the farm-labourer is a fascist and sexually attracted to Celestine. Celestine settles herself and talks to the neighbour, an ex-officer, who likes damaging his neighbour's things. After the death of the old man, she quits her job, but because of the rape and murder of a child 'Little Claire' she decides to stay, believing that Joseph is the murderer. To get his confession she sleeps with him and promises to marry him. In spite of her engagement she fakes evidence to implicate him in the murder. He is arrested, but is released because the evidence is inconclusive. She marries the ex-officer and takes on a housewife role similar to that of Madame Monteil.—Stephan Eichenberg <eichenbe@fak-cbg.tu-muenchen.de>
Plot Keywords: murder, rape, pedophilia, child rape, class differences, infidelity, sexual harassment ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: In this adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel, avant-garde Composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Sir Dirk Bogarde) travels to a Venetian seaside resort in search of repose after a period of artistic and personal stress. But he finds no peace there, for he soon develops a troubling attraction to an adolescent boy, Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), on vacation with his family. The boy embodies an ideal of beauty that Aschenbach has long sought and he becomes infatuated. However, the onset of a deadly pestilence threatens them both physically and represents the corruption that compromises and threatens all ideals.
Plot Keywords: voyeur, based on novel, older man younger man relationship, male objectification, tragedy, german, beach ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Adrián, a talented orchestra conductor, receives a video message from his beloved Belén, telling him with tears in her eyes that she is leaving him, and that she cannot carry on with him anymore. Shattered by the unexpected news of their irreversible break-up and puzzled by Belén's inexplicable decision, Adrián gets help from the local police to solve this mysterious case of disappearance; however, as there is still no news of Belén, a new woman will appear in his life. In the end, with no progress at all in Belén's baffling case, who would think to look beyond the facts, as truth often lies hidden in the most unusual of places?
Plot Keywords: bare breasts, disappearance, female rear nudity, female pubic hair, female nudity, female full frontal nudity, love triangle ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Released from prison apparently under a New Year amnesty, a criminal tries to pick up the threads of a life changed not only by his daring plan to rob a jewellers in out-of-season Cannes but by someone special he met there.—Jeremy Perkins {J-26}
Plot Keywords: friendship, year 1968, newspaper article, year 1967, antique dealer, visitor, visit ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Nada, a down-on-his-luck construction worker, discovers a pair of special sunglasses. Wearing them, he is able to see the world as it really is: people being bombarded by media and government with messages like "Stay Asleep", "No Imagination", "Submit to Authority". Even scarier is that he is able to see that some usually normal-looking people are in fact ugly aliens in charge of the massive campaign to keep humans subdued.
Plot Keywords: brainwashing, teleportation, materialism, sunglasses, alien, nudity, obscene finger gesture ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: A Swedish family travels to the French Alps to enjoy a few days of skiing. The sun is shining and the slopes are spectacular but, during a lunch at a mountainside restaurant, an avalanche turns everything upside down. With diners fleeing in all directions, mother Ebba calls for her husband Tomas as she tries to protect their children. Tomas, meanwhile, is running for his life... The anticipated disaster failed to occur, and yet the family's world has been shaken to its core, a question mark hanging over their father in particular. Tomas and Ebba's marriage now hangs in the balance as Tomas struggles desperately to reclaim his role as family patriarch.—Cannes Film Festival
Plot Keywords: passive aggressive woman, emotionally unstable woman, mentally unstable woman, manipulative woman, female nudity, martyress syndrome, female hysteria ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: Oozing sensuality, the seductively alluring, Eliane Wieck, arrives with her demure German mother and her disabled father in a rural southern French town, in a frilled dress and with a small suitcase in her hand. Pin-Pon, a car mechanic and volunteer firefighter, instantly falls for the charms of the mysterious newcomer--and before long--they get married. However, was it love at first sight for Eliane, too? What links her enigmatic presence to the family's old and dust-covered mechanical piano in the barn? It seems that the stage is set; but, what drives the cryptic young woman? Is it hungry curiosity or is it something far more sinister?—Nick Riganas
Plot Keywords: revenge, breast suckling, pregnant from rape, lesbian kiss, flashback, 1970s, small town ...
Movie Details Click Here!Storyline: ANTHROPOID is based on the extraordinary true story of Operation Anthropoid, the World War II mission to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich. The Reich's third in command after Hitler and Himmler, Heydrich was the main architect behind the Final Solution and the leader of occupying Nazi forces in Czechoslovakia whose reign of terror prompted self-exiled Czech and Slovak soldiers (played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan) to hatch a top-secret mission that would change the face of Europe forever.i
Plot Keywords: nazi, resistance fighter, central europe, torture, gestapo, riding a bicycle, nazi occupation ...
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