October's Top 30 Films
Check out the top 30 films most watched and well-liked on OVID last month!
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Agatha's Almanac
Movie
Directed by Amalie Atkins • Documentary • 2025 • 86 minutes
Fiercely independent 90-year-old Agatha Bock lives alone on her ancestral farm. Despite health challenges, she defiantly tends to her land, cultivating heirloom seeds passed down through generations. Employing antiquated techniques, Aga...
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Batang West Side (Lav Diaz)
Movie
Directed by Lav Diaz • Drama • With Yul Servo, Joel Torre, Gloria Diaz • 2001 • 301 minutes
Investigating the murder of the young Hanzel (Yul Servo) shot dead one winter night, detective Juan Mijares (Joel Torres) plumbs the depths of the Filipino gangs of Jersey city who trade in crystal meth. ...
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Phantom Beirut
Directed by Ghassan Salhab • Drama • With Aouni Kawas • 1998 • 121 minutes
Lebanon at the end of the 80s. Ghassan Salhab’s debut follows Khalil as he returns to Beirut under a new identity, forced to confront the old friends and comrades he left behind following his faked death a decade earlier....
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Nostalgia for the Light
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2010 • 90 minutes
Master director Patricio Guzmán travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, where atop the mountains astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky is so translucent ...
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Desert of Namibia
Movie
Directed by Yoko Yamanaka • Drama • With Yuumi Kawaii, Daichi Kaneko • 2024 • 137 minutes
21-year-old Kana (rising star Yuumi Kawai) works a disaffected job at a beauty salon, where she bristles against the beauty expectations placed on women her age. Her erratic mood and default to self-destruc...
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Black Rabbit, White Rabbit
Movie
Directed by Shahram Mokri • Drama • With Babak Karimi, Hasti Mohammai • 2025 • 139 minutes
The latest film from Iranian master Shahram Mokri (FISH & CAT, CARELESS CRIME) is another mysterious M.C. Escher-like thriller about reality and illusion, doubles and doppelgängers and uncanny synchronicit...
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The Swallows of Kabul
Movie
Directed by Zabou Breitman, Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec • Animation • With Hiam Abbass, Simon Abkarian • 2019 • 81 minutes
The Swallows of Kabul is a powerful animated drama adapted from Yasmina Khadra's acclaimed novel, set in Kabul during the summer of 1998 under Taliban rule. Young lovers Zunaira and...
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The Battle of Chile
Movie + 3 extras
On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende's democratically-elected Chilean government was overthrown in a bloody coup by General Augusto Pinochet's army.
Patricio Guzman and five colleagues had been filming the political developments in Chile throughout the nine months leading up to that...
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Personale
Movie
Directed by Carmen Trocker • Documentary • 2024 • 93 minutes
PERSONALE is set at a four-star hotel in northeastern Italy — a luxurious spot in the Dolomite Mountains, where guests come to ski, swim, and relax. But instead of the scenery, the film focuses on the unseen: the housekeeping staff who...
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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...
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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... -
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...
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Krakatit
Movie
Directed by Otakar Vávra • Drama • With Karel Höger, Florence Marly • 1948 • 101 minutes
Czech director Otakar Vávra's astonishing KRAKATIT is a literal fever dream of a movie that mixes 1940s Film Noir, paranoid thriller and speculative atomic-bomb Sci-Fi in the story of a chemist named Prokop ...
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Seguridad
Directed by Tamara Segura • Documentary • With Tamara Segura • 2024 • 76 minutes
Seguridad, directed by Tamara Segura, offers an intimate, autobiographical examination of familial entanglements rooted in post-revolutionary Cuba.
Born on December 2—the Day of the Cuban Armed Forces—Segura was on...
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Palimpsest: The Story of a Name
Movie
Directed by Mary Stephen • Documentary • 2026 • 109 minutes
Spanning eight decades and four continents, filmmaker and editor Mary Stephen embarks on a personal investigation into her English surname. It is not intended to be a narcissistic exploration, but rather an effort to uncover the dissona...
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Bitterroot
Movie
In western Montana, recently divorced Lue lives with his mother and keeps to a steady, quiet routine: his maintenance job, working his family stand at the farmers market, fly fishing on the river, and midnight outings for karaoke at the local bar. He lives with his widowed mother, Song, whose eff...
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The Maiden
Movie
Directed by Graham Foy • Drama • With Jackson Sluiter, Marcel T. Jiménez • 2022 • 117 minutes
A perfect summer day ends in tragedy, weaving a cosmic connection between three suburban teenagers. Best friends Colton and Kyle float the river, trade dreams, and spray-paint in the local ravine. Like ...
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Dead Mountaineer's Hotel
Movie
Directed by Grigori Kromanov • Drama • 1979 • 84 minutes
Estonian director Grigori Kromanov's dazzling, paranoid mixture of locked-room mystery, 1970s Euro giallo, classic noir whodunit, and (unbelievably) alien sci-fi ala THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, based on a novel by famed Soviet authors Arkad...
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Beijing Watermelon
Movie
Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi • Drama • With Bengal, Masako Motai • 1989 • 135 minutes
Shunzo (Bengal) and his wife Michi (Masako Motai) run a beloved greengrocer on the outskirts of Tokyo. When Lee, a struggling exchange student from China, visits the shop but is unable to afford the produce, a...
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In the Light of Reverence
Directed by Christopher McLeod • Documentary • 2001 • 73 minutes
Across the USA, Native Americans are struggling to protect their sacred places. Religious freedom, so valued in America, is not guaranteed to those who practice land-based religion. Every year, more sacred sites - the land-based eq...
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A Man Vanishes
Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 1967 • 130 minutes
One of the most important and complex works by two-time Palme d'Or winning director Shohei Imamura, A MAN VANISHES begins as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year.
The film ...
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The Cordillera of Dreams
Movie + 5 extras
Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his ...
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Alraune
Movie
Directed by Henrik Galeen • Drama • 1928 • 131 minutes
From pioneering director/writer Henrik Galeen (writer of NOSFERATU and WAXWORKS) comes ALRAUNE. Brigitte Helm (METROPOLIS) is the unholy offspring of a genetics experiment conducted by her scientist "father" Paul Wegener (THE GOLEM) in this ...
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Salvador Allende
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2004 • 100 minutes
A leftist revolutionary or a reformist democrat? A committed Marxist or a constitutionalist politician? An ethical and moral man or, as Richard Nixon called him, a 'son of a bitch'? In SALVADOR ALLENDE, acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Pa...