Collection
When You Want to Think
Slow, contemplative films for quiet reflection — not existentialist argument, just room to think.
A different kind of thinking film than the ones already on this list — not argument, not thesis, but the sensation of a mind slowing down enough to notice its own weight. A childhood remembered in fragments of light. A journey through a forbidden zone that yields nothing but the need to keep walking. A woman repeating the same afternoon until time itself becomes the subject. These films don't hand you ideas to debate. They just leave space where the debate usually goes, and let you fill it yourself.
The impressionistic story of a Texas family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father. Jack finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith.
Near a gray and unnamed city is the Zone, a place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers, and where the normal laws of physics are victim to frequent anomalies. A stalker guides two men into the Zone, specifically to an area in which deep-seated desires are granted.
A lonely young widow lives with her son following an immutable order: while the boy is in school, she cares for their apartment, does chores, and receives clients in the afternoon.
Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds — with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk — that it might be possible for him to take human form.
A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.
Outlaw Jesse James is rumored to be the 'fastest gun in the West'. An eager recruit into James' notorious gang, Robert Ford eventually grows jealous of the famed outlaw and, when Robert and his brother sense an opportunity to kill James, their murderous action elevates their target to near mythical status.
Recently deceased, a white-sheeted ghost returns to his suburban home to console his bereft wife, only to find that in his spectral state he has become unstuck in time, forced to watch passively as the life he knew and the woman he loves slowly slip away.
A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.
Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.
A group of men set out in search of a dead body in the Anatolian steppes
No films in this genre.
