Best movies like Desperate - An East Village Western

Wayland Jackson (Russell), a widower with a young daughter, moves to a small, impoverished mountain village in North Carolina, circa 1934. They are taken in by Collie Wright (McGillis), a single mother with an illegitimate baby, and she and Wayland soon fall in love. Trouble starts when the identity of her baby's father is revealed.

Danny Gold is a Lenny Bruce-style performance artist whose brilliance is only exceeded by his urge to self-destruct. Cad, shark, comic, addict, Danny Gold rockets and ricochets through Manhattan's seedy Lower East Side, leaving in his wake a mass of mutilated relationships and burnt bridges. Comedy...it's no laughing matter.

Bar entertainer Zara is a discontented alcoholic who is pursued by many men but lives with novelist Carl Salter. One day, Tony shows up on Salter's estate claiming that Zara is actually Maria, the wife of his close friend Bruno, claiming that her memory was destroyed during World War I. Zara doesn't remember but leaves with Tony to Salter's dismay. Bruno, now an officer in the Italian Army, tries to coax Maria's memory back on his large estate. No one is really sure if Zara is Maria, and when Salter shows up with a mental case from Trieste that he claims is the real Maria, everyone on Bruno's estate is desperately searching for the truth.

An art dealer, Charles Mortdecai, searches for a stolen painting rumored to contain a secret code that gains access to hidden Nazi gold.

GAZA brings us into a unique place beyond the reach of television news reports to reveal a world rich with eloquent and resilient characters, offering us a cinematic and enriching portrait of a people attempting to lead meaningful lives against the rubble of perennial conflict. Throughout its entire history the Gaza Strip has been witness to conflict and upheaval. From ancient times this tiny coastal territory, located at a crossroads between continents, has been a pawn whose fate rested in the hands of powerful neighbours.

A powerful documentary about five women whose lives have been irrevocably altered by the Rwandan genocide. With the country left nearly 70% female in the wake of the massacres, "God Sleeps In Rwanda" is a lucid portrait of the much larger change affected by women in the East African country.

Britain's top pop artiste, Tom Pickle, travels to Bombay, India, circa 1960s to learn to play the sitar from renowned maestro Ustad Zafar Khan.

August Bolte, the richest man in a settlement in German East Africa in the period before World War I, is called "Mamba" by the locals, which is the name of a deadly snake. Despised by the locals and the European settlers alike for his greed and arrogance, Bolte forces the beautiful daughter of a destitute nobleman to marry him in exchange for saving her father from ruin. Upon her arrival in Africa, she falls in love with an officer in the local German garrison. When World War I breaks out, Bolte, unable to avoid being conscripted, foments a rebellion among the local natives.

Father Michael McKinnon goes from the UK to Boston circa 1935. For unknown reasons, he avoids at all costs the most prominent parishioners, Arthur and Eleanor Barret. Meanwhile Eleanor and Arthur desperately want to have a child, but Arthur is sterile, so they hire Harvard law student Roger Martin to impregnate Eleanor, but unfortunately Roger falls in love with her.

On Manhattan's gilded Upper East Side, a young gay painter is torn between an obsession with his infamous best friend and a promising new romance with an older foreign pianist.

The grind of daily life as a Brick Lane Bangladessi as seen through the eyes of Nazneen (Chatterjee), who at 17 enters an arranged marriage with Chanu (Kaushik). Years later, living in east London with her family, she meets a young man Karim (Simpson).

When a drunken passenger causes taxi driver Lao Shi to swerve and hit a motorcyclist, he stops to help the victim. As no ambulance arrives he drives him to the hospital, but soon has to face the rules of today's Kafkaesque China. With his family and life endangered, he desperately seeks a way out.

Paul Gregory (William Sylvester) is an accomplished composer despite his blindness, and his beautiful wife Anne (Barbara Shelley) seems to be the perfect supporting wife. But unknown to Paul, she is having a passionate affair with Ricky (Alexander Davion), a struggling artist. Keen to support her artist lover and give them more time to make love, she persuades Paul to commission Ricky to paint her portrait. But Paul senses their affection for each other, and threatens to cut Anne off without a penny. Desperate to keep both her lover and Paul s money, Anne plots the perfect murder and asks Ricky to carry it out...

Paris, 1964. The Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, one of the most accomplished and respected artists of his generation, asks his friend, the American writer James Lord, to sit for a portrait, assuring him that it will take no longer than two or three hours, an afternoon at the most.

Andrei Proskuryakov's documentary delves into a profound examination and contemplation of the events that transpired on January 31, 1945. On that day, the Nazis perpetrated a large-scale execution of approximately 3,000 prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp on the shores of the Baltic Sea, near the village of Palmnicken in East Prussia. The film is meticulously structured around three pivotal individuals: Martin Bergau, a former Hitler Youth member who was connected to the tragedy; Gunther Nitsch, a German-American writer whose grandfather was involved in exhuming the victims» bodies; and Simcha Koplowicz, the son of Sheva Koplowicz, a survivor of the massacre. Through these characters, the documentary meticulously examines the historical silence that surrounded this tragedy and endeavors to reveal the unvarnished truth surrounding the event.

A Lower East Side bartender becomes entangled in a murder mystery involving a desperate woman, a missing drug dealer and the scion of a powerful investment firm.

Crump directed the feature-length documentary film Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff + Robert Mapplethorpe, which premiered in North America at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and in Europe at Art Basel. It explores the influence curator Sam Wagstaff, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and musician/poet Patti Smith had on the 1970s art scene in New York City.

Circa 1861, Angelina, ruling countess of an Italian principality, is at a loss when invaded by a Hungarian army. Her lookalike ancestress Francesca, who saved a similar situation 300 years before, comes to life from a portrait to help her descendant. Complicating factor: the newlywed countess feels strangely drawn to the handsome invader...

An American travels to East Africa, where he tries to find out how his brother died.

Duke Mullane, manager of a Malayan tin mine, goes to a little-known island to open a new mine in the jungle. Initially, the natives there are friendly, especially dancer Minyora...who proves to be affianced to local ruler King Kiang. Alas, a series of unfortunate incidents changes Kiang's attitude to hostility, and Duke is stranded with his crew, Minyora, and his old flame Lory...who's now engaged to his boss!

A con man on the run in Africa aids a minister's daughter by helping lead a local tribe to their new homeland.

The tale of a mythical cowboy who appears in a corrupt logging town (circa 1940s) and with the aid of his slide guitar and a giant Hellbug, he's able to battle the evil Mayor and his equally selfish twin brother to clean up the logging town of Sourdough Creek.

Circa 1940 in Trinidad, still a British Colony, lives Ganesh Ramseyor, of East Indian origin, along with his wife, Leela. He longs to reach out to people, especially to Hindus, in order to promote the Hindu Faith, and be known as a writer. He does get considerable success, so much so that he becomes famous as a miracle worker, having cured a man of sharing intimacy with his bicycle; prevented a man from believing that he can fly; and convincing a young woman to end her fast. His fame spreads all over the island and thousands throng to seek his blessings, which he does dole out quite benevolently, without charging any fees from the poor and the needy. He then decides to spread his wings by challenging the local politician Pandit Narayan Chandrashekhar alias Cyrus T., and takes over The Hindu Organization, thence opening his way to a seat in the prestigious Member of the Legislative Assembly

The East Side Kids try to fix up a house for newlyweds, but find the place next door "haunted" by mysterious men.

This is the story of Mei, a young woman on a trip from East to West after her escape from her provincial Chinese village. Beginning in Chongqing and a disastrous factory job, Mei soon heads out for London and a marriage to an older man where her entrapment begins anew.

Lily is a museum curator who finds a painting that looks just like her. Lily’s search for the artist leads her to Ireland, where she meets William, a charming man who helps her on her quest and may also know more about the portrait’s origins than he’s letting on.

Paradise East is a dark comedy about a desperately dysfunctional, lower middle class family, fiercely struggling to make it in the twentieth century.

A fourteen year old lad discovers his first love at the point of his pencil whilst drawing the portrait of a sickly but coquettish fifteen year old girl. In the neighbourhood an old freedom-fighter pits himself against bad types, a pretty cinema-ticket girl takes to the streets at night and a young anarchist dedicates himself to telling tall stories. Far away, in Shanghai, a hero of the Republic meets a beautiful femme fatal with oriental eyes. Reality and fiction become fused in an embrace.

"Laura Smiles" is an alarmingly effective portrait of a woman's mental breakdown. We are introduced to "Laura" at her happiest time, in a warm, loving relationship with her fiancé (a very appealing Kip Pardue) in the city, literally the love of her life. In flashbacks, we then see the sweet development of this relationship out of order as these moments become brightly lit and colored memories that desperately intrude on her later in life, as she becomes consumed with guilt and remorse over his fate. These feelings start to overwhelm her current life as a wife and mother. As something inconsequential in what she calls her "suburban drudgery" triggers the past -- in the supermarket, cooking, cleaning, at a school play-- she acts out increasingly aberrantly to counteract the feelings they generate, especially when she can no longer distinguish past from present from dreams, recalling Blanche Du Bois.

Three friends find themselves desperately needing a divine intervention during the Christmas holidays. One is the son of a kidnapped contractor working in the Middle East; one lost his job and is about to lose his family; and the other lost his faith when his mother died during the holidays. Desperate times call for desperate measures, leading them to do the unthinkable. Now their faith, dreams and hopes will be tested in this touching and inspirational movie.

Set in rustbelt Buffalo circa 1980, Queen City follows the gritty struggle of two flawed detectives from both sides of the tracks whose private and public lives cross as they cope with strain in search of redemption and forgiveness.

The story is set in the Black Hills of South Dakota circa 1876. While making their way through the Badlands, a religious cult is terrorized by a bandit known only as Black Roger.

This documentary follows a team of local archaeologists excavating never before explored passageways, shafts, and tombs, piecing together the secrets of Egypt’s most significant find in almost 50 years in Saqqara.

Journalist Fabian Burstein looks behind the curtains of the porn industry. Starting in Budapest he heads westwards to explore a new world on its victory march rooted deeply in Austria. On this journey he meets the heroes and leading actors of this story: Austrians Mick Blue, Renee Pornero and Thomas Janisch. Porno Unplugged follows its native porn stars to where their lives happen. From east to west...

Follows a group of hippies in Greenwich Village during the 1960's, centering on the story of a girl exploring various relationships with men, and her search for the values of the time.