118m; U.S.
Director: Howard Deutch
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Gene Hackman and Brooke Langton
Synopsis (IMDB): A comedy based on the 1987 professional football players’ strike. Gene Hackman plays the coach of the team, Jack Warden is the owner, Brett Cullen is the All-Pro quarterback that goes on strike and Keanu Reeves is the “scab” who replaces the star QB.
100m; U.S.
Director: Curtiss Clayton
Cast: Bill Pullman, Aaron Stanford and Agnes Bruckner
Synopsis (IMDB): “Rigoletto” retold at Christmas time in Manhattan’s corporate world. Rick, an executive at Image, is a jerk to a woman applying for a job. That evening, he’s out for drinks with his much younger boss, Duke, and the same women is their waitress. Rick’s continued rudeness leads to her getting fired. She puts a curse on him. A potential rift with Duke quickly surfaces; Rick is approached by the hail-fellow Buck, who runs His Own Company, offering to rid Rick of Duke. At dinner later that night, Rick and Duke’s paths cross again; this time Rick is with his stunning and beloved daughter, Eve, a student who has a secret relationship with Duke. All paths lead to the office holiday party.
72m; U.S.
Director: Lexy Lovell, Michael Uys
Synopsis: Riding the Rails offers a visionary perspective on the presumed romanticism of the road and cautionary legacy of the Great Depression. From ‘middle class gentility to scrabble-ass poor,’ the undiscriminating Great Depression forced 4,000,000 Americans away from their homes and onto the tracks in search of food and lodging. Of this number, a disturbing 250,000 of the transients were children. The filmmakers relay the experiences and painful recollections of these now-elderly survivors of the rails. Forced to travel more by economic necessity than the spirit of adventure, the film’s subjects dispel romantic myths of a hobo existence and its corresponding veneer of freedom. Riding the Rails recounts the hoboes’ trade secrets for survival and accounts of dank miseries, loneliness, imprisonment, death, and dispossession. Sixty years later, the filmmakers transport their subjects back to the tracks…
96m; U.K.
Director: Ken Loach
Synopsis: The story of Stevie, a construction worker, and his girlfriend, an unemployed pop singer, serves to show the living conditions of the British working class
27m; U.S.
Director: Encyclopedia Brittanica Educational Corporation
Synopsis: A portrait of the rise of industrial tycoons proposes that, after the Civil War, a combination of economic conditions and the efforts of various individuals produced the large business organizations. Shows the impact of the new economic structure on the lives of workers.
92m; U.S.
Director: John David Coles
Cast: Brian Dennehy, Piper Laurie and Graham Beckel
Synopsis (IMDB): A factory foreman with 36 years experience becomes despondent after being laid off by his company which has just been taken over by a Japanese conglomerate and is unable to find any other work. Meanwhile, his son uses his father’s unemployment as an excuse to drop out of the pre-med program his father pressured him to enter.
119m; U.S.
Director: John G. Avildsen
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire and Burt Young
Synopsis (IMDB): Rocky Balboa is a struggling boxer trying to make the big time, working as a debt collector for a pittance. When heavyweight champion Apollo Creed visits Philadelphia, his managers want to set up an exhibition match between Creed and a struggling boxer, touting the fight as a chance for a “nobody” to become a “somebody”. The match is supposed to be easily won by Creed, but someone forgot to tell Rocky, who sees this as his only shot at the big time
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