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© 2026 The Couch Critic
Browse 38 movies from Paradise Films
A lonely young widow lives with her son following an immutable order: while the boy is in school, she cares for their apartment, does chores, and receives clients in the afternoon.
Jan 1976
A burnt-out New York psychoanalyst exchanges apartments with a Parisian woman. When his patients arrive, they talk to her and then pay. He returns early and becomes a patient as well.
Feb 1996
Ariane lives with Simon in his large Paris flat. Simon is obsessed with her: he wants to know everything about her, secretly follows her when she goes out, asks questions all the time, even in the most intimate moments. Ariane seems to take it all in stride, but Simon realises that she's hiding something.
Sep 2000
In a lively shopping center, proprietors and customers are bustling, including three women vying for a man's heart with song and dance.
Jun 1986
Detached filmmaker Anna Silver arrives in Germany to show her latest film; over the course of some days, she encounters a variety of new and old faces, some of whom make personal revelations to her to little affect.
Oct 1978
Impersonal and beautiful images of Akerman's life in New York are combined with letters from her loving but manipulative mother, read by Akerman herself.
May 1977
A woman suffers a subdued psychological breakdown in the wake of a devastating breakup.
Nov 1974
Moshe Amar is a once poet and now a "businessman" who left his wife with their new born in Israel twenty years ago and spent them in the land of limitless possibilities trying to leave a mark of immortality but, up to that point, only got the marks that frantic debt collectors are more than happy to give. Tsach is the abandoned son who is now a skilled sniper in the Israeli Army. Tsach resents his father for both abandoning his mother for 21 years and not attending her funeral.
May 2008
The intertwined lives of two women in 1970s France, set against the progress of the women's movement in which Agnes Varda was involved. Pomme and Suzanne meet when Pomme helps Suzanne obtain an abortion after a third pregnancy which she cannot afford. They lose contact but meet again ten years later. Pomme has become an unconventional singer, Suzanne a serious community worker - despite the contrast they remain friends and share in the various dramas of each others' lives, in the process affirming their different female identities.
Mar 1977
Following over two dozen different individuals in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance is examined.
Oct 1982
All of the time and effort put forth to stage a musical is chronicled here in this bright and funny French outing. The story is set at a shopping mall where people audition for an upcoming show. Afterwards, they are seen going through the grueling routines of learning the music and rehearsing.
May 1985
Life at the ordinary backyard in Yerevan. Two hours of non-stop jokes and music.
Dec 1996
An exploration of Jewish American identity in a multilayered portrait of the immigrant experience. A series of first-person addresses delivered by a cross-section of Jewish New Yorkers, whose by turns tragic and humourous tales speak to a collective history of trauma, displacement, and resilience.
Oct 1989
In 1940s Malaysia, European merchant Kaspar Almayer is obsessed with finding a treasure to secure his daughter's future. His dreams fall victim to the pressure of his own greed, which becomes a torment. Compounding this is the oppressive English domination dominating the country – and that which brings ruin to the remote village where he lives.
Jan 2012
A married biology professor goes back to her ex boyfriend who is still in love with her. When a secret is revealed, she cannot decide between listening to her heart and her mind.
May 2022
Jack and Julie live in a bare Parisian flat. By day, they make love; by night, Jack is a taxi driver while Julie wanders the city. One day, Julie meets Joseph, the daytime cabbie, and soon Julie spends her nights with Joseph and her days with Jack.
Aug 1991
In a remote, isolated Yazidi Kurdish village in post-Soviet Armenia, Hamo, a widower with a pitiful pension and three worthless sons, travels daily to his wife's grave. There he meets the lovely Nina, who is communing with her late husband. The two are penniless--she works in a local bar that is about to close down, while he has been forced to start selling his meager possessions. All seems hopelessly bleak, yet when Hamo begins to court Nina, their unexpected love revitalizes them.
Nov 2003
In this incisive dispatch from the newly collapsed Soviet empire, bullet holes from WWII still pockmark the old stone buildings. Akerman journeys from East Germany to Moscow between the late summer and winter of 1993 ('while there’s still time'), chronicling in deliberate tracking shots, circular pans, and domestic tableaux yet another moment of radical upheaval in the 20th-century, the faces and bodies of Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Russians weighed down with obedient resignation and uncertainty.
Sep 1993
Akerman films her mother Natalia, an elderly woman of Polish origin, in her Brussels apartment. For two hours, we will see them eating, chatting and sharing memories, sometimes accompanied by Sylvaine, Chantal's sister. Also, and to show how small the world has become, Chantal remains in contact with her mother at other times of the year via Skype from lands as far away from Belgium as Oklahoma or New York.
Feb 2016
Furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back. This breakthrough formal experiment is Akerman's first film made in New York.
Jan 1972