Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)

Director
Louis Malle

Main cast
Phoebe Brand; Lynn Cohen; George Gaynes; Jerry Mayer; Julianne Moore

Genres
Drama, Romance

Description
An uninterrupted rehersal of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" played out by a company of actors. The setting is their run down theater with an unusable stage and crumbling ceiling. The play is shown act by act with the briefest of breaks to move props or for refreshments. The lack of costumes, real props and scenery is soon forgotten.


Similar movies

Film adaptation of Anton Chekhov's story of life in rural Russia during the latter part of the 19th century.
An aristocrat falls for a young woman who brings him ruin. Based on Chekhov's story.
An attractive young couple's open relationship is stretched to the breaking point when each partner finds themselves falling in love with other people.
Set in 1890s North Wales over a long, hot August weekend, the Victorian calm of a household is suddenly upset with the arrival of a London couple who impose their city ways and thoughts on the more rurally based family. An adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play, "Uncle Vanya."
Every choice has a consequence. But what if the flip of a coin could trigger two separate but parallel destinies? Bobby (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Kate (Lynn Collins) are a young New York couple at a crossroads whose lives are about to take very different directions. A seemingly ordinary July 4th is cleaved in two by the flip of a coin. One path leads them to gentle discoveries about family, loss and each other on a visit to Brooklyn, and the other plunges them into an urban nightmare of pursuit, suspense and murder in Manhattan.
Adaptation of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" set in rural Australia in the 1920s. Jack Dickens and his niece Sally run the family farm to support brother-in-law Alexander as a (supposedly brilliant) literary critic in London. Action begins when Alexander returns with his beautiful young wife Deborah, revealing himself as an arrogant failure and wanting to sell the farm out from under Jack. Blakemore introduces themes about Australia's separation from England, as well as expanding the pacifist and ecological philosophies espoused by the local Doctor Max Askey.
Broke and alone on New Year's Eve, Wilson (Scoot McNairy) just wants to spend the rest of a very bad year in bed. But, when his best friend convinces him to post a personal ad, he meets a woman (Sara Simmonds) bent on finding the right guy to be with at midnight.
Lovelife is a 1997 romantic comedy film written and directed by Jon Harmon Feldman. The ensemble cast includes Matt Letscher, Sherilyn Fenn, Saffron Burrows, Carla Gugino, Bruce Davison, Jon Tenney and Peter Krause. Lovelife was nominated for a Feature Film Award at the 1997 Austin Film Festival, and won an Audience Award at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival. The film was winner of the screenplay award at the L.A. Indie fest.
A drama based on a classic short story by Anton Chekhov.
A story based on love between Anton Chekhov and a young writer Lidiya Avilova.
Things have been tough lately for Amelia. Her best friend moved out of the apartment, her cat got cancer, and now her best friend, Laura, is getting married. She copes with things, from the help of Andrew, Frank, Laura, and a brief romance with Bill "The Ugly Guy" Written by Rose Hilburn
Australian teenager Heidi is left with little choice but to leave home after she's caught red-handed with her mother's boyfriend. With few options, Heidi ends up in Jindabyne, a tourist community. Upon meeting Joe at a bar, she pursues a relationship with him and tries to find something resembling a normal home life. Heidi makes small strides by getting a job and finding a place to stay, but her relationship with Joe must overcome more than its share of hurdles.
Rita, a hairdresser with a sharp wit, is married to Denny, and at 26 doesn't want a baby. She wants to discover herself -son she joins the Open University. Dr. Frank Bryant Is a disillusioned university professor of literature. His marriage has failed, his girlfriend is having an affair with his best friend and he can't get through the day without downing a bottle or two of whisky. He refers to himself as an appalling teacher of appalling students. What Frank needs is a challenge ... along comes Rita. In this hilarious and often moving drama, the story tells how two people find a now lease of life through each other.
When playboy and one-hit-wonder novelist Jack Frost (Jason Behr) learns that his childhood sweetheart is getting married, he tries to drown his sorrows by dramatically escalating his self-destructive drinking and womanizing. Frost's pals try to coax him back from the brink, but only a precocious youngster (India Ennenga) in his apartment building finds a way around his defenses. Monet Mazur co-stars in this drama from director Steve Clark.
LIME SALTED LOVE is a minimalist, surreal examination of abandonment, guilt, abuse and psychic pain set in this minute's hipster enclaves of Los Angeles. The film, told in rippling flashbacks from its four main characters, drains out of the eyes of the institutionally confined, David Triebel, his guilt-ridden younger brother, Chase, Ellie, his emotionally damaged girlfriend, and Zephyr, the sexual provocateur. In the visual narrative tradition of David Lynch the film depicts the tale of three bonded brothers broken by the accidental death of one and the residual guilt draping the remaining two The film examines how damaged people are hurt even more by their own willful ways. Sometimes it is the smallest things we do to others that destroys them...
With his marriage to Audrey almost at an end, Ben begins a torrid affair with Mercedes, a young French student in his writing class. The affair soon spins out of control, their emotions and Ben and Audrey's family hanging in the balance.
A Yugoslav stage actor marries an American girl in Belgrade and has a child with her, when his career downhill out of political reasons he develops a drinking habit, his wife leaves him and takes their daughter to U.S.A.
On holiday in Yalta, Muscovite banker Dimitri Gurov contrives to meet a young woman who walks her dog. She’s Anna Sergeyovna, trapped in a loveless marriage to a lackey. He’s unhappy in an arranged marriage. With neither spouse at hand, Dimitri and Anna begin an affair. After a short time, she returns to Saratov, he to Moscow, believing it’s good-by forever. All winter he is miserable, enervated, distracted by tristesse. In desperation, he contrives to go to Saratov, surprising her at a concert. Fearing discovery in her home town, she promises to come to Moscow. Will they cast aside reputation to live together, or will theirs be an affair of infrequent encounters in hotel rooms?
Things take an interesting turn for Tanya and her mother when her father arrives with his foster son Kolya and new wife. This film is about Kolya and Tanya's bright, pure and bitter first love.
A mechanic at his father's garage during the late 1970s, Matt dreams about leaving his small town existence and pursuing grander ambitions. But strong feelings for a new girlfriend and deep family ties may prevent Matt's ultimate escape, despite pressure from best friend Schultz to take off immediately. Coming-of-age story in a small town.
Victor is a cook who works in a greasy bar/restaurant owned by his mother, Dolly. It's just the two of them, a waitress named Delores, and a heavy drinking regular, Leo. But things change when Callie, a beautiful college drop-out, shows up as a new waitress and steals Victor's heart. But Victor is too shy to do anything about it, and too self-consciously overweight to dream of winning Callie away.
A fictionalized account of the last days of opera singer Maria Callas (Ardant).
It is early 1939 in Poland when Mrs. Bromley and Jennifer come to buy antiques for her business in London. Jennifer meets Count Stephen and they wine, dine and see the sights though out the city. He wishes to marry, but his family is against plain Jennifer. When she tries to leave, he catches her at the train station and they are married. To be self sufficient, they modernize the family farm with tractors and increase production, but then Germany starts the war.
Aboard a ship early in the 20th-century, a middle-aged Italian tells his story of love to a Russian. In a series of flashbacks filmed almost entirely in creams, whites, and ochers, the clownish and superfluous Romano Patroni leaves his wife's opulent home to visit a spa where he falls in love with a Russian woman whose marriage is a horror. He pursues her into the Russian heartland and returns to Italy resolved to leave his wife and marry his love. His amazed and appreciative Russian listener then narrates a shorter story.
A rich, young beauty, Louise Durant, follows the man she loves and hopes to marry to Zurich where he studies violin at the conservatory. A piano student at the conservatory falls madly in love with Louise. The violinist loves his music first and Louise second. The pianist loves Louise first and his music second. Louise must ultimately choose which man she wants.
Tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a teenager in the late 1950s had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that at the expense of her freedom.
L'Amore in Città (English: Love in the City) is a 1953 anthology film composed of six different segments, each with a different writer or director. List of episodes in order of appearance: "Paid Love" written and directed by Carlo Lizzani, "Attempted Suicide" by Michelangelo Antonioni, "Paradise For Three Hours" by Dino Risi, "Marriage Agency" by Federico Fellini, "Story of Caterina" by Cesare Zavattini and Umberto Maselli, and "Italians Stare" written and directed by Alberto Lattuada.
A drama focused on the friendship between a high-functioning autistic woman and a man who is traumatized after a fatal car accident.
The title character is a married provincial schoolmaster and a notorious philanderer. He is a russian Don Juan except that he himself doesn't seek to seduce; the women around him simply find him irresistibly attractive, and he is only too happy to go along. The play predates the realism of Chekhov's later works in its desjointedness, but many of its scenes show the seeds of brilliance that would eventually emerge.
Zia, distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, decides to end it all. Unfortunately, he discovers that there is no real ending, only a run-down afterlife that is strikingly similar to his old one, just a bit worse. Discovering that his ex-girlfriend has also "offed" herself, he sets out on a road trip, with his Russian rocker friend, to find her. Their journey takes them through an absurd purgatory where they discover that being dead doesn't mean you have to stop livin'!
Beautiful violin virtuoso Camille has two obsessions: the music of Ravel, and a friend of her husband's who crafts violins. But his heart seems to be as cold as her playing is passionate.
This charming comedy tracks the lives of several romantic pairs through trials and tribulations. The main focus of the story is a young soldier with a good heart but little ambition and his fiancée, who feels torn when a charming and sophisticated intellectual enters her life and sweeps her off her feet. There are also several side stories, also all dealing with relationships, most significantly the soldier's mother, whose comfortable but unexceptional marriage is threatened when a past love returns to her life.
It is a story about the last love affair of Ivan Bunin (played by Andrei Smirnov). It is set in the French Riviera in the 1940s.
ARRANGED centers on the friendship between an Orthodox Jewish woman and a Muslim woman who meet as first-year teachers at a public school in Brooklyn. Over the course of the year they learn they share much in common - not least of which is that they are both going through the process of arranged marriages.
Film about filmmaking. It takes place during one day on set of non-budget movie. Ultimate tribute to all independent filmmakers.
Set in a seaside resort in the Caucasus, the story centers on n'er do well, Laevsky (Andrew Scott) and his illicit relationship with his mistress Nadya (Fiona Glascott). Laevsky has convinced Nadya to leave her husband for him, but now wants to abandon her.
A country doctor (Franchot Tone) loves but cannot have a professor's wife (Clarence Derwent) in Chekhov's play set in czarist Russia.
When Dr. Anthony Edwardes arrives at a Vermont mental hospital to replace the outgoing hospital director, Dr. Constance Peterson, a psychoanalyst, discovers Edwardes is actually an impostor. The man confesses that the real Dr. Edwardes is dead and fears he may have killed him, but cannot recall anything. Dr. Peterson, however is convinced his impostor is innocent of the man's murder, and joins him on a quest to unravel his amnesia through psychoanalysis.
The story of an aspiring young filmmaker's encounter with a grumpy fount of movie lore.
Linda Darnell plays a beautiful Russian peasant in this moody Sirk melodrama, based on Chekhov's "The Shooting Party." Trying to pull herself out of serf-ish poverty, she works her charms on an engaged aristocrat (George Sanders) with tragic results.
In a bustling office in Mumbai, Kartik Krishnan sits behind his desk coding HTML websites when he chances upon a blog on cinema featuring Independent filmmakers. This sparks his intentions to make his own short film, thus leading him to contact Srinivas Sunderrajan, an independent filmmaker who agrees to guide him through the process. As he begins piecing the story, cast and screenplay together, several inexplicable phenomena start emerging in his life including a sinister stalker dressed in official government clothing; and the sudden appearance of a strange future-telling antique toy. Troubled with these bizarre developments and the unresolved feelings that he harbours for Swara, his office colleague, Kartik embarks on an extraordinary journey that transcends love, life and logic itself.
Two misunderstood suburban kids challenge society and run from the police while documenting all of their deeds with a digital camera.
At an all girl school, a group of girls annually stages a play. This year they pick Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard." After vigorous rehearsals the play faces cancellation because one student gets caught smoking after school.
Via the New York Times: "...a severely obscure meditation on pre-revolutionary Russia in the form of an encounter between a ghost from the past and the ghost's present-day guardian. In fact, the two characters seem to be the shade of Anton Chekhov and the young man who tends a Chekhov museum in the Crimea, though that is never made explicit."
Paul Giamatti stars as himself, agonizing over his interpretation of "Uncle Vanya." Paralyzed by anxiety, he stumbles upon a solution via a New Yorker article about a high-tech company promising to alleviate suffering by extracting souls. Giamatti enlists their service -- only to discover that his soul is the shape and size of a chickpea.
Ten years after the war, West Germany's market economy is booming. Into an unnamed city that's rife with corruption comes a new building commissioner, Herr von Bohm, committed to progress but also upright. He's smitten by Marie-Louise, a single mother who's his landlady's daughter. Von Bohm does not realize she is also Lola, a singer at a bordello and the mistress of Schuckert, a local builder whose profits depend on von Bohm's projects. When von Bohm discovers Marie-Louise's real vocation and looks closely at Schuckert's work, will this social satire play out as a remake of "Blue Angel," a visit of Chekhov to West Germany, or an update of Jean Renoir's "Rules of the Game"?
A grandfather and his grandson go to a fair to sell a horse. A ranger and his vicious partner, Matijevic, follow them as they return home in order to rob them. The confrontation takes place in the forest.
Loner Diane Ford (Michelle Monaghan) is a truck driver with an 11-year-old son, Peter (Jimmy Bennett), whom she never sees, and that's fine with her. But, when Peter's father, Len (Benjamin Bratt), falls ill, he asks Diane to take care of their son for a while. Eventually, Diane reluctantly agrees, but she quickly realizes that caring for a child interferes with her independent lifestyle -- and Peter isn't all that thrilled with the arrangement, either.
Romanian director Lucian Pintilie directed this Yugoslav film based on Chekhov's famous story. A doctor from provincial town in Tsardom of Russia meets his former student in Ward 6, where the story takes place. Impressed by his rebellious spirit and clever remarks, he tends to spend more time with him while also indulging in meditation, only to be ridiculed by his fellow colleagues.
This movie tells five stories set in a single day at the famed Chelsea Hotel in New York City, involving an ensemble cast of some 30-35 characters.
Bearing traces of the old Anton Chekhov play The Wedding, The Contract is set during an "arranged" ceremony. The bride and groom barely know each other, but this matters not at all to their tradition-bound families. At the last minute, the bride balks. Only slightly nonplused, the groom's father, a status-seeking doctor, decides to go ahead with the expensive reception anyway. Polish director Krzysz Zanussi uses this scenario to stick it to capitalist corruption, and to society's destruction of the individual spirit. Leslie Caron, the one recognizable member of the cast, is outstanding as a wealthy, over-the-hill ballerina who happens to be a kleptomaniac.
An unattractive 7th grader struggles to cope with suburban life as the middle child with un-attentive parents and bullies at school.
Moi drug Ivan Lapshin is loosely based on several literary works of his father, Iurii German, mainly on his 1938 novel Lapshin. In terms of its historical context, the film exists at the intersection between Brezhnev’s stagnation and Gorbachev’s reforms. Moi drug Ivan Lapshin was completed in the early 1980s, but was not perceived positively at its pre-screening at Lenfilm and was shelved. However, having made several changes to the film, German managed to secure its release few years later, when the political climate began to change. The film was released shortly prior to the Fifth Congress of the Union of Cinematographers, but nevertheless, is always conventionally considered a perestroika film and part of the cinematic new wave that was represented by the new films seeking to address taboo subjects and those films that were unshelved and released for public consumption after the decades of oblivion. (from http://www.obskura.co.uk/stalin-ghost-lapshin/)
When troubled teen boy Stevie (Cameron Van Hoy) and his girlfriend, Rocky (Mischa Barton), attempt to rob a bank without any forethought, the situation rapidly deteriorates. Soon the young couple is holding bank customers and employees hostage, while law enforcement gathers outside. Daniel Bender (Burt Reynolds), a veteran negotiator for the FBI, is charged with assessing the crime scene and ending the standoff as quickly as possible, but Stevie's short fuse considerably complicates matters.
Chekhov in contemporary Argentina. Mecha and Gregorio are at their rundown country place near La Ciénaga with their teen children. It's hot. The adults drink constantly; Mecha cuts herself, engendering a trip to the hospital and a visit from her son José. A cousin, Tali, brings her children. The kids are on their own, sunbathing by the filthy pool, dancing in town, running in the hills with shotguns, driving cars without licenses. One of the teen girls loves Isabel, a family servant constantly accused of stealing. Mother and son, son and sisters, teen and Isabel are in each other's beds and bathrooms with a creepy intimacy. With no adults paying attention, who's at risk?
Based on the true story of Valerie Solanas who was a 60s radical preaching hatred toward men in her "Scum" manifesto. She wrote a screenplay for a film that she wanted Andy Warhol to produce, but he continued to ignore her. So she shot him. This is Valerie's story.
Based on a short story "Ward No. 6" by Anton Chekhov.
Sophie Jacobs is going through the most difficult time of her life. Now, she just has to find out if it's real.
There's drama aplenty for the travelling theatre company Chekhov Cabaret. The actors share the good times and the bad as a nomadic tribe where work and private life always mingle. They don’t mince words, these obstreperous actors with a sardonic sense of humour. Theatre always comes first.
Ottaal (The Trap) is a Malayalam film directed by Jayaraj and is an adaptation of the short story "Vanka" by Russian writer Anton Chekhov

© Valossa 2015–2024