Crossing Over (2009)
Director
Wayne Kramer
Main cast
Harrison Ford; Ray Liotta; Ashley Judd; Jim Sturgess; Cliff Curtis
Genres
Drama
Description
Immigrants from around the world enter Los Angeles every day, with hopeful visions of a better life, but little notion of what that life may cost. Their desperate scenarios test the humanity of immigration enforcement officers. In Crossing Over, writer-director Wayne Kramer explores the allure of the American dream, and the reality that immigrants find â and create -- in 21st century L.A.
Wayne Kramer
Main cast
Harrison Ford; Ray Liotta; Ashley Judd; Jim Sturgess; Cliff Curtis
Genres
Drama
Description
Immigrants from around the world enter Los Angeles every day, with hopeful visions of a better life, but little notion of what that life may cost. Their desperate scenarios test the humanity of immigration enforcement officers. In Crossing Over, writer-director Wayne Kramer explores the allure of the American dream, and the reality that immigrants find â and create -- in 21st century L.A.
Similar movies
An innocent immigrant woman is tricked into a life of burlesque and vaudeville until a dazzling magician tries to save her and reunite her with her sister who is being held in the confines of Ellis Island.
A Los Angeles journalist befriends a homeless Juilliard-trained musician, while looking for a new article for the paper.
An urban hotel in London is a gathering and flash point for legal and illegal immigrants attempting to cobble together their lives in a new country. The immigrants include Senay, a Turkish woman, and a Nigerian doctor named Okwe who is working as a night porter at the hotel. The pair discover the hotel is a front for all sorts of clandestine activities. Their only wish is to avoid possible deportation. Okwe becomes more entangled in the goings on when he is called to fix a toilet in one of the rooms. He discovers the plumbing has been clogged by a human heart.
In 1950s Los Angeles, a special crime squad of the LAPD investigates the murder of a young woman.
The story depicts two star-crossed lovers: Marcus Hanson (Mario Maurer), a Thai superstar, and Joey Hermosa (Erich Gonzales), a Filipina baker. When Marcus decides to fly to Philippines to escape from his career, he meets Joey. Even though their worlds collide, the two later fall in love. But their relationship is tested by conflicts from their worlds.
Harvard graduate James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) is the sheriff of prosperous Jackson County, Wyo., when a battle erupts between the area's poverty-stricken immigrants and its wealthy cattle farmers. The politically connected ranch owners fight the immigrants with the help of Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), a mercenary competing with Averill for the love of local madam Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert). As the struggle escalates, Averill and Champion begin to question their decisions.
Los Angeles, 1949. Ruthless, Brooklyn-born mob king Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) runs the show in this town, reaping the ill-gotten gains from the drugs, the guns, the prostitutes and â if he has his way â every wire bet placed west of Chicago. And he does it all with the protection of not only his own paid goons, but also the police and the politicians who are under his control. Itâs enough to intimidate even the bravest, street-hardened cop⦠except, perhaps, for the small, secret crew of LAPD outsiders led by Sgt. John OâMara (Josh Brolin) and Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), who come together to try to tear Cohenâs world apart.
The film focuses on Angie (Kierston Wareing), a working class woman who, after being fired by the agency that she works for, decides to set up a recruitment agency of her own, running it from her kitchen with her friend Rose (Juliet Ellis). Taking advantage of the desperation of immigrants, Angie is able to build a successful business extremely quickly.
An earthquake shatters a peaceful Los Angeles morning and opens a fissure deep into the earth, causing lava to start bubbling up. As a volcano begins forming in the La Brea Tar Pits, the director of the city's emergency management service, Mike Roark, working with geologist Amy Barnes, must then use every resource in the city to try and stop the volcano from consuming Los Angeles.
In the smog-choked dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, blade runner Rick Deckard is called out of retirement to kill a quartet of replicants who have escaped to Earth seeking their creator for a way to extend their short life spans.
In late 1940s Los Angeles, Easy Rawlins is an unemployed black World War II veteran with few job prospects. At a bar, Easy meets DeWitt Albright, a mysterious white man looking for someone to investigate the disappearance of a missing white woman named Daphne Monet, who he suspects is hiding out in one of the city's black jazz clubs. Strapped for money and facing house payments, Easy takes the job, but soon finds himself in over his head.
Ray Eddy, an upstate New York trailer mom, is lured into the world of illegal immigrant smuggling. Broke after her husband takes off with the down payment for their new doublewide, Ray reluctantly teams up with Lila, a smuggler, and the two begin making runs across the frozen St. Lawrence River carrying illegal Chinese and Pakistani immigrants in the trunk of Ray's Dodge Spirit.
After the Portuguese government demolishes his slum and relocates him to a housing project on the outskirts of Lisbon, 75-year-old Cape Verde immigrant Ventura wanders between his new and old homes, reconnecting with people from his past.
From director John Frankenheimer ('The Manchurian Candidate') comes this powerful drama of soaring ambition and shattered dreams that takes a provocative insider's look at the way our country goes to war--as seen from inside the LBJ White House leading up to and during Vietnam.
In the slums of the upper West Side of Manhattan, New York, a gang of Polish-American teenagers called the Jets compete with a rival gang of recently immigrated Puerto Ricans, the Sharks, to "own" the neighborhood streets. Tensions are high between the gangs but two kids, one from each rival gang, fall in love leading to tragedy.
In Los Angeles at the turn of the 1970s, drug-fueled detective Larry "Doc" Sportello investigates the disappearance of an ex-girlfriend.
A US Fighter pilot's epic struggle of survival after being shot down on a mission over Laos during the Vietnam War.
With the help of a talking freeway billboard, a "wacky weatherman" tries to win the heart of an English newspaper reporter, who is struggling to make sense of the strange world of early-90s Los Angeles.
An inexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoyevsky's 'The Possessed'. The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and reality. She winds up playing a real-life role posing as the dead wife of another Czech immigrant, who is manipulated by the filmmaker into commiting a political assasination.
A dirty bomb goes off in Los Angeles, jamming freeways and spreading a toxic cloud.
Marcel Marx, a former bohemian and struggling author, has given up his literary ambitions and relocated to the port city Le Havre. He leads a simple life based around his wife Arletty, his favourite bar and his not too profitable profession as a shoeshiner. As Arletty suddenly becomes seriously ill, Marcel's path crosses with an underage illegal immigrant from Africa, who needs Marcel's help to hide from the police.
Behrani, an Iranian immigrant buys a California bungalow, thinking he can fix it up, sell it again, and make enough money to send his son to college. However, the house is the legal property of former drug addict Kathy. After losing the house in an unfair legal dispute with the county, she is left with nowhere to go. Wanting her house back, she hires a lawyer and befriends a police officer. Neither Kathy nor Behrani have broken the law, so they find themselves involved in a difficult moral dilemma.
An Irish immigrant family adjusts to life in the United States.
Set in the backdrop of God's own country, Kerala, Acha Din is the story of a family from Jharkhand who is now settled in Ernakulam, the vibrant business hub of Kerala.
Elias (Riccardo Scamarcio) is an immigrant in his twenties who tries to get to Europe by a boat along with other illegal immigrants. When the boat is near the Greek shores and they hope they will soon disembark, a marine patrol approaches and Elias jumps into the sea in order to avoid arrest. So do the other people in the boat. He wakes up next morning in a shore with nudists, which is not so bad after all, since he has lost some of his clothes while he was swimming for quite a few hours. He pretends to be a nudist himself, steals some clothes and he pretends he is an employee of the hotel âEden Club-Paradiseâ.
In the year 2159, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes (Jodie Foster), a hard line government ofï¬cial, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesnât stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max (Matt Damon) is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that, if successful, will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.
Private eye Jake Gittes lives off the murky moral climate of sunbaked, pre-World War II Southern California. Hired by a beautiful socialite to investigate her husband's extra-marital affair, Gittes is swept into a maelstrom of double dealings and deadly deceits, uncovering a web of personal and political scandals that come crashing together.
Los Angeles citizens with vastly separate lives collide in interweaving stories of race, loss and redemption.
Bilal is 17 years old, a Kurdish boy from Iraq. He sets off on an adventure-filled journey across Europe. He wants to get to England to see his love who lives there. Bilal finally reaches Calais, but how do you cover 32 kilometers of the English Channel when you can't swim? The boy soon discovers that his trip won't be as easy as he imagined... The community of struggling illegal aliens in Calais
After a series of small tremors in Los Angeles, Dr. Clare Winslow, a local seismologist, pinpoints the exact location and time of when the long awaited earthquake--"The Big One"--will strike southern California. With this information, she must battle city officials to release this information to the general public. Also, she hopes that her family is out of harms way when the quake strikes. Subplots show how other families and people cope with the the tremors that strike before the impending "Big One."
A multi-strand narrative set in early 1980's Los Angeles, that deftly balances a vast array of characters who represent both the top of the heap and the bottom. Connecting the intertwining strands are a group of beautiful, blonde young men and women who sleep all day and party all night, doing drugs and one another with abandon, never realising that they are dancing on the edge of a volcano.
An illegal Chinese immigrant falls behind on payments on an enormous smuggling debt. Ming Ding has only until the end of the day to come up with the money.
Earthquake is a 1974 American disaster film that achieved huge box-office success, continuing the disaster film genre of the 1970s where recognizable all-star casts attempt to survive life or death situations. The plot concerns the struggle for survival after a catastrophic earthquake destroys most of the city of Los Angeles, California.
A group of Spanish refugees try to organize protests from France. Their network is under constant threat by the police and some of them have recently been arrested. The main character (played by Yves Montand) dedicated his whole life to the battle but he feels forever estranged. He doesn't find his place nor in his adoptive country (France) nor in love.
But this film is not about the story, it's all about style. Alain Resnais has an original approach in this film and this is the thing that makes this film worth watching.
One Man's Hero tells the little-known story of the "St. Patrick's Battalion" or "San Patricios," a group of mostly Irish and other immigrants of the Catholic faith who deserted to Mexico after encountering religious and ethnic prejudice in the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War. The plot centers around the personal story of John Riley, an Irishman who had been a sergeant in the American Army who is commissioned as a captain in the Mexican army and commands the battalion, as he leads his men in battle and struggles with authorities on both sides of the border
Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) are former boxers-turned-cops in 1940's Los Angeles. When aspiring young actress Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner) turns up dead, Blanchard and Bleichert must grapple with corruption, narcissism, stag films, and family madness as they pursue the killer.
A talented New York bartender takes a job at a bar in Jamaica and falls in love.
An alien slave crashes lands in New York city while being pursued by two Men in Black bounty hunters. His attempt to find a place for himself on earth parallels that of the immigrant experience.
JUNG Jin-soo, a South Korean intelligence agent, comes across an unidentifiable operative, a 'ghost,' while surveilling a North Korean weapons deal in Berlin. The mystery figure is a North Korean secret agent, PYO Jong-seong, whose information cannot be found on any intelligence database. Jung quickly goes after Pyo to unveil his identity and gets himself embroiled in a vast international conspiracy. In the meanwhile, another North Korean operative, DONG Myung-soo, is dispatched to Berlin with a secret agenda to purge Pyo and take control of the North Korean embassy. Dong sets a trap to frame Pyo's wife, RYUN Jung-hee, for treason and tightens the noose around Pyo's neck. Pyo surveils his wife with hopes of clearing accusation against her but he plunges into deeper confusion when he discovers her secret.
After World War II, 4,000 Polish families came to Australia. They were Jews, Fascists, anti-Communists, and others dispossessed. In a large hostel, where even married men and women were housed in separate barracks, the adults lived for two years while they worked off the government's payment of their passage. Even though he is married to Anna and has a son, Julian falls in love with Nina and she with him. As they and others face the new situations and prejudices that await immigrants and as they take on aspects of Australian culture, old-country values reassert themselves. Julian decides what to do about love and family, and Nina must find a way to move on.
An idealistic rookie cop joins the LAPD to make ends meet while finishing law school, and is indoctrinated by a seasoned veteran. As time goes on, he loses his ambitions and family as police work becomes his entire life.
Real-life figures from the Cold War era mix with a fictional story based on a group of CIA operatives and their counterparts in the KGB, MI6, and the Mossad.
A fishing-boat crew takes on a dangerous commission to smuggle a group of illegal immigrants from China to Korea.
One night in the New Orleans slums, vicious hoodlum Blackie and his friends kill an illegal immigrant who won too much in a card game. Next morning, Dr. Clint Reed of the Public Health Service confirms the dead man had pneumonic plague. To prevent a catastrophic epidemic, Clint must find and inoculate the killers and their associates, with the reluctant aid of police captain Tom Warren, despite official skepticism, and in total secrecy, lest panic empty the city. Can a doctor turn detective? He has 48 hours to try...
Gene Watson is a public accountant who arrives on a train at Union Station in Los Angeles, accompanied by his 6-year-old daughter Lynn. Because of his ordinary looks, he is approached by a pair of sinister people named Smith and Jones.
A college professor travels to New York City to attend a conference and finds a young couple living in his apartment.
John H. Groberg, a middle class kid from Idaho Falls, crosses the Pacific to become a Mormon missionary in the remote and exotic Tongan island kingdom during the 1950's. He leaves behind a loving family and the true love of his life, Jean. Through letters and musings across the miles, John shares his humbling and sometimes hilarious adventures with "the girl back home", and her letters buoy up his spirits in difficult times. John must struggle to overcome language barriers, physical hardship and deep-rooted suspicion to earn the trust and love of the Tongan people he has come to serve. Throughout his adventure-filled three years on the islands, he discovers friends and wisdom in the most unlikely places. John H. Groberg's Tongan odyssey will change his life forever.
The life story of a salt-of-the-earth Irish immigrant, who becomes an Army Noncommissioned Officer and spends his 50 year career at the United States Military Academy at West Point. This includes his job-related experiences as well as his family life and the relationships he develops with young cadets with whom he befriends. Based on the life of a real person.
Four Black women, all of whom have suffered for lack of money and at the hands of the majority, undertake to rob banks. While initially successful, a policeman who was involved in shooting one of the women's brothers is on their trail. As the women add to the loot, their tastes and interests begin to change and their suspicions of each other increase on the way to a climactic robbery.
Follows the exploits of an Indian immigrant trying to make it in New York City in 1973.
Keen young Raymold Avila joins the Internal Affairs Department of the Los Angeles police. He and partner Amy Wallace are soon looking closely at the activities of cop Dennis Peck whose financial holdings start to suggest something shady. Indeed Peck is involved in any number of dubious or downright criminal activities. He is also devious, a womaniser, and a clever manipulator, and he starts to turn his attention on Avila.
History comes gloriously to life in Disney's epic animated tale about love and adventure in the New World. Pocahontas is a Native American woman whose father has arranged for her to marry her village's best warrior. But a vision tells her change is coming, and soon she comes face to face with it in the form of Capt. John Smith.
A young mouse named Fievel and his family decide to migrate to America, a "land without cats," at the turn of the 20th century. But somehow, Fievel ends up in the New World alone and must fend off not only the felines he never thought he'd have to deal with again but also the loneliness of being away from home.
Menace II Society is a coming of age tale detailing the summer after its protagonist Caine (Tyrin Turner) graduates from high school. This is Caine's story, which details real life in today's tough inner city.
A Sicilian family deals with the arrival of a group of immigrants on their island.
On November 4, 1970 on The CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite reported on a true, horrific story that was about to rock the country. A 13-year-old girl was discovered in the small Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia who was still in diapers, barely able to walk and unable to speak. Kept in severe isolation by her parents with virtually no human contact for more than 10 years, she was confined to her bedroom, tied to her potty-chair and left to fend for herself.
A terminally ill woman and a debonair murderer facing execution meet and fall in love on a trans-Pacific crossing, each without knowing the other's secret.
Terrence McDonagh, a New Orleans Police sergeant, who starts out as a good cop, receiving a medal and a promotion to lieutenant for heroism during Hurricane Katrina. During his heroic act, McDonagh injures his back and later becomes addicted to prescription pain medication. McDonagh finds himself involved with a drug dealer who is suspected of murdering a family of African immigrants.
After a car wreck on the winding Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesic, she and a perky Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality.
American-born Gogol, the son of Indian immigrants, wants to fit in among his fellow New Yorkers, despite his family's unwillingness to let go of their traditional ways.
© Valossa 2015–2024
