Best movies like Maravillas
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Maravillas Starring Fernando Fernán Gómez, Cristina Marcos, Enrique San Francisco, José Luis Fernández 'Pirri', and more. If you liked Maravillas then you may also like: We'll Take Manhattan, Only Human, Lope, Raising Bertie, Kiss The Bride and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
A young Catholic girl takes viewers through a changing Spanish political and social landscape as she develops from her confirmation day to adulthood. Her first experience with the real Spain comes when her Jewish godfathers cannot come to her confirmation. One of the godfathers, using a ring, poses an early challenge to her innocence that puts her in danger. He later returns, indirectly introducing her to a new boyfriend. If he is one of the symbols for Jewish life under Franco, or for a Judeo-Christian interaction, that interaction is complex. The young woman encounters different lovers as she grows into adulthood, but at the same time she is burdened with financially supporting her father and his own rather decadent lifestyle. Again, this difference in generations could be understood as a difference between the "new" and "old" Spain; it is up to the viewers to interpret the story elements as they decide.
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Only Human
Leni takes Rafi to meet her family in Madrid. Leni's family is Jewish - mother, father, older sister and daughter, brother, and grandfather. Rafi is Palestinian, in Spain since age 12. Before her father returns from work, Leni reveals Rafi's origins. He accidentally drops a block of frozen soup out the flat window, probably killing a passerby. Leni initiates a cover-up and Rafi figures out the body is probably Leni's father. The body disappears and without telling the rest of the family what they know, Leni and Rafi organize a search for dad. Mom is sure he's having an affair. Leni's belly-dancing sister kisses Rafi. Her brother grabs a rifle to shoot the Arab. Can anything be put right?
Lope
A chronicle of the life of Spanish playwright and poet Lope de Vega, who dominated Spain's early Golden Age of Theater in the 16th century. Lope returns home from war and enters the theater world when a producer's beautiful daughter takes a shine to him. They embark on a passionate affair as his plays begin to win popular acclaim.
Raising Bertie
Raising Bertie is a longitudinal documentary feature following three young African American boys over the course of six years as they grow into adulthood in Bertie County, a rural African American-led community in Eastern North Carolina. Through the intimate portrayal of these boys, this powerful vérité film offers a rare in-depth look at the issues facing America's rural youth and the complex relationships between generational poverty, educational equity, and race. The evocative result is an experience that encourages us to recognize the value and complexity in lives all too often ignored.
Kiss The Bride
Sibling drama overshadows the impending nuptials of Danni Sposato and her longtime boyfriend, Geoff Brancato. Television actress Niki brings her manager-boyfriend, Marty, to meet the family for the first time, while spiky youngest sister Toni shows off her bandmate and lover, Amy, and driven Wall Street banker Chrissy flashes the status symbols of her financial success.
Sex & the Single Mom
Jess Gradwell and her teenage daughter boast a superclose relationship. When it comes to sex, however, Mom won't stand for anything less than premarital celibacy. So she gets a pretty healthy dose of her own medicine when she winds up getting pregnant from a brief encounter with a newly single doctor! This new situation poses a major challenge to the mother-daughter dynamic. Tune in to see if Jess and her daughter can rise to the occasion.
A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon
A recent high school graduate is faced with two options, either go to a business school where his father wants him to go to, or get a full time job. However he decides to defy his father and go to Hawaii. Trouble is he has no money. Along the way he comes to understand his parents and eventually bonds with his father.
Girl Play
Two real-life lesbian actresses meet by chance when they are cast as lovers in a local stage play, and end up actually falling in love. Robin, who is married to her girlfriend for half a dozen years, and Lacie, someone who never had a lasting relationship, are both cast to play lesbian lovers in a Los Angeles stage play. Innocently, the stage director, Gabriel runs the actresses through a series of rehearsals designed to "bring out the intimacy" in each performer. Soon the two women find themselves increasingly and undeniably attracted to each other and overcome with desire. They must ask themselves whether this relationship is manufactured, created for the sake of the "girl play", or is true love.
Three Steps Above Heaven
Story of two young people who belong to different worlds. It is the chronicle of a love improbable, almost impossible but inevitable dragging in a frantic journey they discover the first great love. Babi is a girl from upper-middle class that is educated in goodness and innocence . Hache is a rebellious boy, impulsive, unconscious, has a appetite for risk and danger embodied in endless fights and illegal motorbike races, the limit of common sense
Street Warriors
Perros Callejeros is based on the juvenile delinquency of the 1970s and 80s in Spain. The story is set in Barrio de la Mina in Barcelona one of the most conflict neighbourhoods in Spain. The characters chosen were real juvenile delinquents all with criminal records, which the director used to give the film a realistic touch. This film is very powerful and dramatic, it shows how these kids were brought up to survive on the streets.
Melissa P.
An adolescent girl, living with her mother and her grandmother, will have her first sexual experiences in a heavy and excessive way.
Copenhagen
After weeks of traveling through Europe, the immature William finds himself in Copenhagen, the place of his father’s birth. He befriends the youthful Effy, who works in William’s hotel as part of an internship program, and they set off to find William’s last living relative. Effy’s mix of youthful exuberance and wisdom challenges William unlike any woman ever has. As the attraction builds, he must come to grips with destabilizing elements of his family’s sordid past.
The Sex Of The Angels
Struggling martial artist and dancer Bruno loves his girlfriend Carla, but when he meets fellow dancer Rai, serious sparks begin to fly, opening the couple up to new possibilities. A new generation navigates sexual fluidity, torn affections, and open relationships in this complicated love triangle.
Liberty Heights
This semi-autobiographical film by Barry Levinson follows various members of the Kurtzman clan, a Jewish family living in suburban Baltimore during the 1950s. As teenaged Ben completes high school, he falls for Sylvia, a black classmate, creating inevitable tensions. Meanwhile, Ben's brother, Van, attends college and becomes smitten with a mysterious woman while their father tries to maintain his burlesque business.
Kids in Love
Drifting through his gap year with its internships and travel plans, Jack has always suspected there was more to life than this. A chance encounter with the beautiful and ethereal Evelyn swerves his life radically off course.
To Save a Life
Jake Taylor has everything. He has a beautiful girl, he's the champion in basketball and beer pong, and everyone loves him. Then, an old childhood friend of his commits suicide. Jake wonders what he could've done to save his friend's life. A youth minister tells him that Jake needs God. So Jake becomes a Christian. However, things begin to spin out of control. Jake is going to realize just what it means to be a Christian and how, to save a life.
Sunshine
The story of a Jewish family living in Hungary—through three generations—rising from humble beginnings to positions of wealth and power in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire. The patriarch becomes a prominent judge but is torn when his government sanctions anti-Jewish persecutions. His son converts to Christianity to advance his career as a champion fencer and Olympic hero, but is caught up in the Holocaust. Finally, the grandson, after surviving war, revolution, loss and betrayal, realizes that his ultimate allegiance must be to himself and his heritage.
Tevye
Tevye is a dairyman in the Russian Ukraine early in the 20th century. He lives in a cabin outside Boyberik with his wife Goldie, his widowed daughter Tseytl, her two children, and his younger daughter, the unmarried Khave. Khave is being courted by Fedya, a Christian, the son of a local government official. Tevye warns Khave against romance and marriage outside her faith, but Fedya is persuasive too. What will Khave decide, how will Tevye react, and when the Tsar initiates a pogrom, will Tevye's friends come to his defense? Can the stubborn Tevye reconcile his heart and tradition?
Stay As You Are
A May-December romance. Roué Giulio Marengo, a Roman landscape architect unhappy in his marriage, meets Francesca, a young and beautiful Florentine, and then learns she might be his daughter. He resolves to keep his hands off but can't seem to stay away, and she's eager for a lover who's a father figure.
Take Two
Is God really the giver of second chances? Can He take a worthless, selfish, self-serving and self-centered, drug addicted broken down life and restore it with forgiveness, mercy and love? Is he able to guide and direct someone facing hopelessly seeming impossible circumstances, and lead them through to amazing grace? TAKE TWO is the True Story about a decadent Hollywood film producer who bottoms out in Los Angeles California and loses everything. Frustrated that he continues to wake up every morning to his same failed life he decides to leave L.A. to seek a new life, only to quickly realize he has taken himself with him. In the beginning of his trek he meets a beautiful young woman in a small bar in Wyoming. Unaware that she is already married and has children, they have a one-night affair that leads to the birth of a baby girl.
The Younger Generation
Soap-opera about a social-climbing Jewish man and his old-world parents who are heartbroken by his rejection of them. Young Morris Goldfish follows his immigrant father into business. His ruthless business practices cause him to become a big success, and he moves the family to Park Avenue. They go, but were happier back on the East Side. Morris is ashamed of this parents and his humble origins, but learns in the end that there is more to life than money.
The Lost Paradise
This literary film is imbued with the disenchantment of Spanish exiles who left their homes to protest Franco's fascist regime and then returned after its demise to find that democracy had not instilled either ethics or deep motivation in government leaders. Director Basilio Martin Patino presents his story, and a large part of the film is based on his own life, through the experiences of an exiled heroine played by Charo Lopez. She has returned to Spain to look for meaning in her life, something that she never found living in Germany, not even after having a child. She is also in the process of translating the German lyric poet Friederich Holderlin (see the 1985 Halfte Des Lebens) into Spanish, focusing on his epic Hyperion. Excerpts from the translation are voiced over throughout the film. As she looks up old friends from many, many years ago, even those who have achieved worldly success are suffering from the same ennui that propelled her back home.
A Long Way Off
Jacob is tired of living on the family farm, submitting to the rules of his father. One day he demands an early inheritance from his father, who shocks his young son by agreeing to give it to him. So, he heads to the big city doing things his way without restraint, and for a while he does well-surprisingly well. He takes huge business risks and converts his small fortune into a big fortune, despite his extremely flamboyant lifestyle that attracts the wrong women, including seductive Laura, whose rich boyfriend Frank is often dangerously nearby. Jake had it all: money, ladies, prestige-but then-he loses it all and just when he things he's hit bottom the bottom drops some more- until he is eating out of dumpsters and eventually ends up living in a literal pig pen. Coming to his senses he heads home, determined to work in an entry level position for his dad, who surprises him once again by running to him-but is it to kiss him or kill him?
Talk of Angels
This is the story of a young Irish woman who comes to Spain to escape from the pressures she feels about her impending marriage to a political activist in Ireland. But in Spain in the 1930's, taking a job of governess in a wealthy family, she finds the same kinds of political unrest. In fact, it isn't long before she finds herself attracted to a married man who is similarly involved in the struggle against fascism and Franco. This awakens her to her nature that brings her to such men and resolves for her what she must do about the life she left in Ireland
Lost Embrace
In Buenos Aires, the twenty-something Jewish-Argentinean Ariel Makaroff ditches the University of Architecture and spends his time wandering through the downtown gallery where his mother has a lingerie shop and his brother runs an importation business. Ariel has never understood why his father left him when he was a baby, but when his dad returns to Argentina, that will soon change.
Matar al Nani
The story of El Nani, a juvenile delinquent from the years of the Transition, whose disappearance in a police station after an interrogation has not yet been clarified, putting the accent on the denunciation of police brutality and speculating on the outcome of the story. A story that mixes political denunciation and social chronicle of an era.
Little Annie Rooney
A feisty little girl, the daughter of a beat cop, faces the challenges of growing up in a tough city neighborhood.
Who Would You Take to a Deserted Island?
On their last night together, four longtime flatmates' lives are suddenly upended when a secret is revealed during the course of an evening celebration.
The 13 Roses
True story of thirteen totally normal young women that suffered harsh questioning and were put in prison under made up charges of helping the rebellion against Franco back in the 1940s. Despite of their innocence, the thirteen were soon executed without even a trace of evidence of any wrong doing.
The Rite of Spring
Laura has just arrived in Madrid to study at University. One night, she accidentally meets David, who has cerebral palsy. The relationship with the boy and his mother will give Laura the push she needs to overcome her complexes and insecurities and confidently enter a new phase. A story about that vital moment when anything is possible and how the most unexpected encounters can change our lives.
The Creature
Tender and erotic love story of a respectable bourgeois housewife and a large black Alsatian dog. Shot in 1977, the film employs bestiality as a symbol of Spain's political landscape. It makes references to the massacre of Atocha and to political right wing groups that, after the death of Francisco Franco, tried to maintain the dictator’s political ideals.
Criando ratas
Latest example of Spanish "neokinki" cinema, which was popular in the late seventies/early eighties, right after the end of Franco's dictatorship. Destructured families of low social classes are the perfect environment for delinquency, drugs, violence and broken lives.
We'll Take Manhattan
We’ll Take Manhattan explores the explosive love affair between sixties supermodel Jean Shrimpton and photographer David Bailey. Focusing on a wild and unpredictable 1962 Vogue photo shoot in New York, the drama brings to life the story of two young people falling in love, misbehaving and inadvertently defining the style of the Sixties along the way.