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August's Top 30 Films

August's Top 30 Films

Check out the top 30 films most watched and well-liked on OVID last month!

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August's Top 30 Films
  • Gemma Bovery

    Directed by Anne Fontaine • Drama • With Fabrice Luchini, Gemma Arterton, Jason Flemyng • 2015 • 99 minutes

    In this vibrant seriocomic re-imagining of Flaubert’s literary classic Madame Bovary, life imitates art in uncanny ways when earthy British beauty Gemma Bovery (Gemma Arterton) and her fur...

  • School's Out

    Movie

    In this dread-soaked cerebral thriller from filmmaker Sébastien Marnier (Faultless, The Origin of Evil), a teacher throws himself from a classroom window before the terrified eyes of his students. Despite the tragedy, six of them remain oddly cool and unemotional. Pierre (Laurent Lafitte), the ne...

  • Cooked: Survival by ZIP Code

    Directed by Judith Helfand • Documentary • 2020 • 82 minutes

    Chicago suffered the worst heat disaster in U.S history in 1995, when 739 residents--mostly elderly and black-died over the course of one week. As Cooked: Survival by ZIP Code links the deadly heat wave's devastation back to the underl...

  • Hiroshima Bound

    Directed by Martin Lucas • Documentary • 2015 • 56 minutes

    HIROSHIMA BOUND is a personal documentary that tracks the construction of America's collective memory (or lack of one) of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It follows the obscure histories of specific photos and photographers, both...

  • My Brooklyn

    Directed by Kelly Anderson • Documentary • With Jamel Shabazz, Craig Steven Wilder, Kelly Anderson • 2012 • 76 minutes

    My Brooklyn follows director Kelly Anderson's journey, as a Brooklyn gentrifier, to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood. The film documents the redevelopment of Ful...

  • I Like Killing Flies

    Directed by Matt Mahurin • Documentary • With Kenny Shopsin • 2004 • 78 minutes

    In 2002, an unusual eatery called Shopsin's loses its lease after 32 years. Filmmaker Matt Mahurin goes inside the diner to figure out its gastronomic appeal, and paint a portrait of its colorful owners Kenny and Eve...

  • Finding Kukan

    Directed by Robin Lung • Documentary • 2017 • 75 minutes

    Kukan, a landmark color film that documented Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion of China in the early days of World War II, was the first ever American feature documentary to receive an Academy Award® in 1942. When Robin Lung disc...

  • This Is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth

    Movie

    For more than 40 years, journalist Robert Fisk has reported on some of the most violent and divisive conflicts in the world.
    Yung Chang’s This Is Not a Movie captures Fisk in action—feet on the ground, notebook in hand, as he travels into landscapes devastated by war, ferreting out the facts and...

  • My Motherland (w/ Fanny Ardant)

    Directed by Benoît Cohen • Drama • With Fanny Ardant, Nawid Elham, Pierre Deladonchamps • 2025 • 91 minutes

    Celebrated actress Fanny Ardant stars as “France”, a well-to-do widow living alone in her Parisian apartment. When she hears on the radio that an NGO is pairing homeless refugees with thos...

  • An Act of Conscience

    Directed by Robbie Leppzer • Documentary • With Martin Sheen, Randy Kehler, Pete Seeger • 1997 • 90 minutes

    How far are you willing to go to stand up for your deepest beliefs? For Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner of Colrain, Massachusetts, their life-long commitment to pacifism led them to risk los...

  • The Art of Nothing

    Movie

    "Tabula rasa and vita nova," exclaims artist Jean-Yves Machond (Benoît Poelvoorde). "A clean slate and a new life." Leaving Brussels and his job as a professor to settle in Normandy, Machond searches for inspiration, convinced he still has something to say with his art.
    The small town of Étretat...

  • Youth (Hard Times)

    Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2024 • 226 minutes

    YOUTH (HARD TIMES) is the second installment in Chinese director Wang Bing’s monumental series chronicling the lives of migrant garment workers — some as young as 15 — in the Zhili district of Huzhou City. Wang immerses himself in the live...

  • Youth (Spring)

    Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2023 • 215 minutes

    The town of Zhili, about 95 miles from Shanghai, is a center for the children’s garment industry. Workers in their teens and early twenties come from surrounding provinces to live in sparse, trash-strewn concrete dorms in the same building...

  • Maborosi (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

    Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda • Drama • With Makiko Esumi, Tadanobu Asano • 1995 • 110 minutes

    One of the finest films of Japanese cinema, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first feature film Maborosi is a story of love, loss, and ultimately, regeneration.

    Haunted by the mysterious loss of her grandmother m...

  • Time Regained

    Directed by Raúl Ruiz • Drama • With Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Béart, Vincent Perez • 2018 • 163 minutes

    Raúl Ruiz’s most ambitious literary adaptation and considered his greatest cinematic achievement.  An Official Selection at both the Cannes and New York Film Festivals and starring an out...

  • Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism's Unholy War on Democracy

    Directed by Stephen Ujlaki, Christopher Jacob Jones • Documentary • With Peter Coyote • 2024 • 89 minutes

    BAD FAITH explores the dangerous rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States. Part archival chronicle, part exposé, the film reveals the secretive political machinery that has relentl...

  • The Universal Theory

    Directed by Timm Kröger • Drama • With Jan Bülow, Olivia Ross • 2024 • 118 minutes

    Set in 1962 at a quantum mechanics conference in an isolated lodge nestled amid the towering landscapes of the Swiss Alps, THE UNIVERSAL THEORY is the story of a gifted young physicist, his curmudgeonly mentor, an...

  • Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?

    Directed by Yong-Kyun Bae • Drama • With Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, Tom Reynolds
    • 1989 • 137 minutes

    The first ever feature-length film from South Korea to gain theatrical distribution in the USA, WHY HAS BODHI-DHARMA LEFT FOR THE EAST? has received acclaim from critics and audiences around...

  • Heimat is a Space in Time

    Directed by Thomas Heise • Documentary • 2019 • 218 minutes

    In HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME, German filmmaker Thomas Heise shares the stories of three generations of his family, in their own words.

    Heise sets the tone early, reading an anti-war essay written in 1912 by his grandfather Wilhelm, whe...

  • Please Baby Please

    Directed by Amanda Kramer • Drama • With Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling, Demi Moore • 2022 • 95 minutes

    Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling) live an outwardly traditional lifestyle as the Lower East Side’s most bohemian Eisenhower-era couple. The pair’s cage is rattled when th...

  • Bestiaire

    Directed by Denis Côté • Documentary • 2012 • 72 minutes

    Fascinating and beguiling, BESTIAIRE is Denis Côté's mesmerizing meditation on the relationship between man and beast. This strikingly beautiful film about looking-starts with a group of art students attempting to sketch an animal-that blu...

  • Yurumein (Homeland)

    Directed by Andrea E Leland • Documentary • With Cadrin Gill, Edgar Adams • 2014 • 50 minutes

    YURUMEIN (your-o-main) is an important untold story of Carib/Garifuna resistance against slavery that deserves its place in the annals of the African Diaspora. The film recounts the painful past of the ...

  • A Crack in the Mountain

    Directed by Alastair Evans • Documentary • 2022 • 99 minutes

    Deep in the jungle of Central Vietnam, lies a magnificent underground kingdom. Hang Son Ðoòng which translates as “mountain river cave”, is located in the Phong Nha-Ke Bàng National Park in Quang Bình Province. It is the largest cave p...

  • Las Abogadas: Attorneys on the Front Lines of the Migrant Crisis

    Directed by Victoria Bruce • Documentary • 2022 • 92 minutes

    The first Trump administration tried to shut down immigration to the United States, and even with no changes to the actual law, they nearly succeeded. Things didn't get much better when Biden came into office. But activist lawyers, mos...