best relatively unknown film you've ever seen and vague plot please

[alwayshappy101]

I watched a lovely film the other week called life is beautiful-bout the strength of the human spirit.was amazing,but none of my friends/family have heard of it.as I didn't before watching.

Really want to know if there are any other hidden gems out there?my fab genres are comedy,horror and ww2.

Might be more well known now that the main actor is a Lannister - The Station Agent

Quiet character study - young man who's crazy about trains gets left an old station when his boss dies. He moves there, makes friends, etc. Developed a bit of a crush on Peter Dinklage after this.

The Last Train
Just realised this is another train film. Erm - sheer coincidence, not a trainspotter honest! This opens unpromisingly in a committee meeting of a Uruguayan trainspotters society. Then it turns into a caper movie, with 3 pensioners stealing The Last Steam Train in Uruguay before the owner can ship it off to a museum in the USA. Funny and heartbreaking by turns. Always meant to get hold of a copy for a train-mad relative, but he died recently so now too late.
m.imdb.com/title/tt0303267/

I love Brassed Off; I come from a very similar community and my grandfather, father and aunt all played in the local brass band. My grandfather even played at the champs at the Royal Albert. The lack of jobs and the devastation of the community is spot on, so it resonates very strongly with me.

Red is great fun and the sequel is good, also. I really like Gross Pointe Blank, too. If you like those films you'll probably enjoy Lucky Number Slevin and Pushing Tin, the former about a man who gets caught up in a war of rivals and the latter about air traffic controllers.

My other vote is Bedrooms and Hallways, a comedy about a gay man who gets involved in a relationship with a straight man who is already involved with a woman. The main plot is interesting but fantastically funny performances by Tom Hollander and Hugo Weaving as a mismatched couple really make it. There's also some great fantasy interludes using various film genres

Man bites Dog - it's a fictional account of a camera crew making a documentary of an active serial killer. Really compelling but incredibly dark.

Run, Lola, Run - looks at the same story several times but noting how the outcome is changed dramatically even though only small changes are made each time.

Have you tried Before Sunrise / Before Sunset / Before Midnight ? Richard Linklater trilogy set over a number of years, first one set in 90s, 2 young people meet on a train and gave a 24 hour romance. Fantastic.

Life is Beautiful is heart-breaking. But other films of that era - The Lives of Others, Downfall ..

I LOVE an indie/foreign film. Check out your local independent cinema!

short I love the 'before films.

I love a film called 'the science of sleep'. Brilliant.

There's a film called Goodbye Lenin set in Berlin in 1989 (wall coming down) its funny and tragic and brilliant all at once.

Don't know how 'unknown' it is but I love Children of Men. Based on the PD James book, it's set in the near future when humans have become infertile and life has become meaningless. Clive Owen's best performance imo.

PD James was a total visionary.

A Field in England - a very trippy black and white film about a small group of deserters during the English Civil War who are pressed into searching an apparently innocuous field for buried treasure. Made on a shoestring and filmed in less than two weeks.

Ink - a little girl's soul is kidnapped by a monster whilst she sleeps, leaving her body comatose. The film follows her journey through the dreamworld and how her family copes in the real world. It's absolutely wonderful.

The Dish which is about the team that ran the radio telescope in Australia that picked up the transmissions from the moon landing. It's really beautiful little comedy; one of those that is poignant as well. Sam Neill is (as always) wonderful in it. It's one of my all time favourites

Neither are nice films but:

The Machinist
Christian Bale years as a man trying g to come to terms with a traumatic experience. Excellent performances and wonderfully shot.

Freeze Frame
Lee Evans plays a paranoid man who films every second of his life to avoid being framed for crimes he hasn't committed. Lee Evans is absolutely brilliant in a serious dramatic role.

Also, I don't know how unknown it is but:
Memento.
Guy Pearce stars as a man suffering short term memory loss and is trying to find the killer of his wife. The film runs backwards, the final scene first and each scene after is the scene before. Excellent story and fantastic Guy Pearce.

Not in the least unknown, and not in the least classy, but what the hell, it's a chance to plug Soapdish. I think it came out in the late 80s, early 90s maybe. It's a slapstick pastiche of daytime soap opera in the US possibly a cheap knockoff of Tootsie The cast is fantastic, all performing to the very top of their considerable chops, the script is hilarious and it's my best bad day/popcorn/laugh my socks off movie. So many stupid in-jokes that aren't even made much of - like the appalling costumes and the music.

Kolya - beautiful, moving about a young boy. His mother's gets married to an older man, it is a marriage of convenience but the relationship between the young boy and his stepfather blossoms.

The Killing Fields - a drama about a journalist in Cambodia and his interpreter. It looks at the kymer rouge regime. Well known but old.

The Damned United a great film starring Martin Sheen as Brian Cough, I have no interest in football but it was great.

Pather Panchali, a film about a Bengal family leaving in poverty but it's beautifully observed and an uplifting portrayal of childhood.

Captain have you seen The Castle by the same writer/director? About an Aussie family whose house is under threat from airport developers? Also great.

Oh i loved Soapdish! Not thought of that film for years

I loved The Station agent and another film I adored was Awaking Ned Devine about a lottery winner who's just died. Doesn't sound promising but it's super.

Memento is great, one of Chtis Nolans early films. I liked Coherence too.

I like a film called Advantageous - dystopian future which questions a woman's place in the world as she gets older and loses her looks. It's a sad tale about woman and her hopes for her daughter.

Tyrannosaur is good too, about a friendship between a woman who is a victim of domestic violence and a man who is an alchoholic.

Lif is Beautiful won a bunch of Oscars, so it's hardly that obscure! What planet are your friends on? I loathed it.

The original French title is Une Liaison pornographique, but I think the version released here was called An Intimate Affair, or An Affair of Love? From 1999, Sergi Lopez and Nathalie Baye play two people who get together to act out some unspecified sexual fantasy via a personal ad in a magazine, but it develops into a passionate relationship. Very French, very romantic and low-key, told as flashbacks with both characters being interrogated by an anonymous questioner.

Or A Month on the Country, a 1987 dramatisation of a JL Carr novel, with a young Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh playing men newly returned from WWI, one an archaeologist, one uncovering a medieval wall painting in a north of England church and recovering over one summer. Quietly brilliant.

Too Wong Foo, thanks for everything Julie Newmar. My absolute favourite feelgood film, John Travolta and Wesley Snipes as drag queens.

Still crazy
70's rock band re-forms but has to tour Europe before big British festival. Lead singer has a complex because he took over from original dead singer. Witty cathartic and brilliantly acted by Billy Connolly. Bill Nighy. Jimmy Neil. Stephen Rea and Timothy Spall.

DH adores Soapdish and does a mean Sally Field impression. Braised Off makes me howl. The combination of the music and Pete Postlethwaite.

Captain Fantastic. Loved it SO much, fave movie this year. Has Viggo Mortensen.

In the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a father devoted to raising his six kids with a rigorous physical and intellectual education is forced to leave his paradise and enter the world, challenging his idea of what it means to be a parent

It Follows. Horror film about a girl who inherits a nasty supernatural entity after she has sex with a boy who the entity previously haunted. The entity is passed on by sex.

Excellent film

For comedy ones I enjoy that not many watch or seem to know:

The Wrong Guy with Dave Foley
What We do in the Shadows - New Zealand Vampire Film
So I married an axe murderer - very early Mike Myers

I saw a very odd Japanese movie called R100 but it's very black and involved BDSM.

Other genres:

Once were warriors
8mm with Nicolas Cage
Blood Simple one of the first Cohen Brothers films iirc.

Then more Asian horrors:

Audition
Battle Royale

And anything by Wes Anderson:

Rushmore
Bottle Rocket

And my all time favourite The Royal Tennenbaums. So many famous actors in that yet so many people have never watched it.