Production
American Movie documents the story of filmmaker Mark Borchardt, his mission, and his dream. Spanning over two years of intense struggle with his film, his family, financial decline, and spiritual crisis, American Movie is a portrayal of ambition, obsession, excess, and one man's quest for the American Dream.
Bright young student Raymond Aibelli is forced to sidetrack an important medical internship because his mother, Susan, is recovering from a broken leg. When he isn't tasked with the most mundane aspects of Susan's recuperation, Raymond finds distraction in a neighborhood girl, Toni Peck. But, as Susan begins relying on her son for both physical and emotional needs, Raymond starts developing disturbing and unwanted new yearnings.
Adopted as a child, new father Mel Colpin decides he cannot name his son until he knows his birth parents, and determines to make a cross-country quest to find them. Accompanied by his wife, Nancy, and an inept yet gorgeous adoption agent, Tina, he departs on an epic road trip that quickly devolves into a farce of mistaken identities, wrong turns, and overzealous and love-struck ATF agents.
After her husband, Carl, suddenly leaves, Joline travels from New York to Texas to track him down. Although Joline tries to remain upbeat, she is discouraged when she discovers that Carl already has a new girlfriend, the lovely Carmen. Familiarizing herself with Carl's new home and friends, Joline gets company in the form of her brother, Jay. Will Joline win Carl back, or are there other romantic possibilities on her horizon?
In 1962 in Montgomery, Alabama, State Attorney Richmond Flowers, Sr. is one of few willing to fight racial injustices even if it costs him his family's peace.
A pregnant teen and her younger sister run away from foster homes and kidnap a woman whom they believe can help with the pregnancy.
Set in the rustic Midwestern town of One Fall, the film tells the story of a man, James (Marcus Dean Fuller), who miraculously survived a horrific fall from a spectacular 200 foot-high cliff and was never heard from again. However, three years after vanishing James chooses to return to his hometown of One Fall -- but he returns a changed man. For an incomprehensible reason James has developed supernatural healing abilities since the fall. He must decide whether to use his abilities to help the ones he once turned his back on, or to continue running from his mysterious past.
At age 73, writer and melancholy master of the bon mot, Quentin Crisp (1908-1999), became an Englishman in New York. Nossiter's camera follows Crisp about the streets of Manhattan, where Crisp seems very much at home, wearing eye shadow, appearing on a makeshift stage, making and repeating wry observations, talking to John Hurt (who played Crisp in the autobiographical TV movie, "The Naked Civil Servant"), and dining with friends. Others who know Crisp comment on him, on his life as an openly gay man with an effeminate manner, and on his place in the history of gays' social struggle. The portrait that emerges is of one wit and of suffering.
Lauren Marcus (Amanda Donohoe) reluctantly moves back to New York City and is forced to decide whether she wants to reconnect with the life she abruptly left behind. When a mystery stemming from a suicide draws her in, she and two friends, a young bookie and a cynical federal agent, seek to uncover the truth.
A reclusive aging widower struggling with tax problems has a complete change in his views of life as he has a chance encounter with a young woman who moves in with him briefly.
Her deepening affair with a separatist spurs a wealthy Manhattanite to return to the Bronx, where she grew up, and reevaluate her Puerto Rican cultural roots.
