Bright Lights, Big CityMovies like Bright Lights, Big City
- Key Features:
- Existential crisis, Coming-of-age, Urban alienation, Drug abuse, Alcoholism, Grief, Estrangement, Writers journey, New York City, Self-destruction, Nudity-moderate
- Tone:
- serious, gritty, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- Literary film enthusiasts, Drama lovers, Urban audiences
- Emotional Arc:
- Disillusionment → Despair
Bright Lights, Big City

A disillusioned young writer living in New York City turns to drugs and drinking to block out the memories of his dead mother and estranged wife.
Bright Lights, Big City
A day in the life of a group of teens as they travel around New York City skating, drinking, smoking and deflowering virgins.

A New York writer on sex and love is finally getting married to her Mr. Big. But her three best girlfriends must console her after one of them inadvertently leads Mr. Big to jilt her.

Two teens facing personal struggles form a powerful bond as they embark on a cathartic journey chronicling the wonders of Indiana.

A college freshman returns to Los Angeles for Christmas at his ex-girlfriend's request, but discovers that his former best friend has an out-of-control drug habit.

In an alternate present-day where magical creatures live among us, two L.A. cops become embroiled in a prophesied turf battle.

An intimate portrait of Hollywood royalty featuring Debbie Reynolds, Todd Fisher, and Carrie Fisher.

John LeTour is a recovering drug user who suffers insomnia and still deals to a high-end New York clientele, even though he’s trying to move on from the business. John’s professional midlife crisis becomes something more acute — and dangerous — when he re-encounters an old flame while a string of seemingly drug-related murders rocks the city.

Documentary filmmaker Erik and closeted lawyer Paul meet through a casual encounter, but they find a deeper connection and become a couple. Individually and together, they are risk takers — compulsive, and fueled by drugs and sex. In an almost decade-long relationship defined by highs, lows, and dysfunctional patterns, Erik struggles to negotiate his own boundaries and dignity and to be true to himself.

James White is a troubled twentysomething trying to stay afloat in a frenzied New York City. As he retreats further into a hedonistic lifestyle, his mother's battle with a serious illness faces a series of setbacks that force him to assume more responsibility. With the pressure on him mounting, James must find new reserves of strength or risk imploding completely.

An aspiring dancer moves to New York City and becomes caught up in a whirlwind of flighty fair-weather friends, diminishing fortunes and career setbacks.

London is a drug laden adventure that centers on a party in a New York loft where a young man is trying to win back his ex-girlfriend.

A drama that follows three adults during a single day in New York, one filled with sex, drugs, and indecision.

A divorced writer from the Midwest returns to her hometown to reconnect with an old flame, who's now married with a family.

Four small gangsters from Copenhagen trick a gangster boss: they take over 4,000,000 kroner which they were supposed to bring him. Trying to escape to Barcelona they are forced to stop in the countryside, in an old, wrecked house, hiding there for several weeks. Slowly, one after another, they realize, that they would like to stay there, start a new life.

A young man turns from drug addiction and petty crime to a life redeemed by a discovery of compassion.

A German student, Stefan, now finished with his studies, hitchhikes to Paris. There he meets a free-spirited American girl, Estelle, who he follows to Ibiza. The two begin a sad and dark path into heroin addiction.

In need of creative inspiration, a professionally stagnant and hard-partying Los Angeles artist recklessly indulges in a series of drug binges. As the narcotics fly out of control, so does her newfound and inexplicable, yet unquenchable, craving for blood.

A bigoted junkie cop suffering from borderline personality disorder and drug addiction manipulates and hallucinates his way in a bid to secure promotion.

The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.

Summer, New York City. A college girl falls hard for a guy she just met. After a night of partying goes wrong, she goes to wild extremes to get him back.

When talented young writer Elizabeth Wurtzel earns a scholarship to Harvard, she sees it as her chance to escape the pressures of her working-class background and concentrate on her true talent. But what starts out so promising leads to self-destructive behavior and paralyzing depression that reflects an entire generation's struggle to navigate the effects of divorce, drugs, sex, and high expectations.

Noni Jean is a hot new rising star. But not all is what it seems, and the pressure causes Noni to nearly fall apart - until she meets Kaz Nicol, a promising young cop and aspiring politician who's been assigned to her detail. Can Kaz's love give Noni the courage to find her own voice and break free to become the artist she was meant to be?

A recovering drug addict is granted a day’s leave from rehab and returns to Oslo, where he reconnects with friends, faces the weight of his past, and struggles with uncertainty about his future. Over the course of one day, he drifts through encounters that reflect his longing for connection and his deep sense of alienation.

Two young women and their friends spend spare time at an exclusive nightclub in 1980s New York.

Poet/lecturer Charles Serking awakens from his alcoholic haze long enough to take a bus back to L.A. and plunge into an orgy of drink and sexual depravity.

Sutter, a popular party animal, unexpectedly meets the introverted Aimee after waking up on a stranger's lawn. As Sutter deals with the problems in his life and Aimee plans for her future beyond school, an unexpected romance blossoms between them.

A young heroin addict roams the streets of New York to panhandle and get her next fix, while her unstable boyfriend drifts in and out of her life at random.

The son of a wealthy businessman finds solace in drugs and alcohol when he breaks up with his childhood love.

After experiencing a traumatic misfortune, Jasmine French, a wealthy woman from New York, moves to San Francisco to live with her foster sister Ginger and the firm purpose of getting a new life, but she will be haunted by anxiety and memories of the past.

New York is a contemporary story of friendship set against the larger than life backdrop of a city often described as the centre of the world. Omar has gone abroad for the first time in his life and soon enough he begins to see and love America through the eyes of his American friends - Sam and Maya. It is the story of these three friends discovering a new world together.

A group of suburban teenagers try to support each other through the difficult task of becoming adults.

The Los Angeles club scene is a place of booze-fueled decadence and debauchery. In a night full of possibilities, eight 20-somethings take to the clubs seeking good times, companionship and maybe a little sex. But in the harsh light of the morning after, their worlds are thrown into a spin of confusion when hungover Sara accuses hard-partying Mike of date rape. Loyalties are tested as each among them is forced to take sides.

Two men, working as professional boxers, come to blows when their careers each begin to take opposite momentum.

A terminally ill teen upsets her parents when she falls in love with a small-time drug dealer.

The relationships of two couples become complicated and deceitful when the man from one couple meets the woman of the other.

Hard-drinking novelist Zach Hutton spirals out of control after his wife and mistress both leave him. Alone and crippled by a bad case of writer's block, Zach slips in and out of casual relationships and one-night stands, while his drinking becomes more and more severe. With the help of a bartender and his therapist, Zach confronts his demons — women and alcohol.

Suffering from insomnia, disturbed loner Travis Bickle takes a job as a New York City cabbie, haunting the streets nightly, growing increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the filthy city.

A smooth-talking ad executive attributes his remarkable success with women to his ability to manipulate their emotions from the moment he first meets them. When his teenage nephew drops in for a visit, he soon learns that his approach isn't as foolproof as he thought when he attempts to teach the boy how to pick up women.

Three extraordinary stories covering infidelity, adoption, and a drug dealer turned actor intertwine as characters meet in the streets of London.

King is a young man, but he's already a veteran of life on the streets of Los Angeles. The de facto leader of a group of teenage runaways, King acts as a mentor to troubled kids such as gay hustler Little J and junkie Greg. When Heather, a beautiful girl from Chicago, starts hanging out with King and his crew, it changes the dynamic of the gang. However, it seems as though nothing will alter their dangerous lifestyle.

In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.

Charlie is a troublesome 18-year-old who breaks out of a youth drug treatment clinic, but when he returns home to Los Angeles, he's given an intervention by his parents and forced to go to an adult rehab. There, he meets a beautiful but troubled girl, Eva, and is forced to battle with drugs, elusive love and divided parents.

A slightly dystopian vision of LA, we follow three disaffected teenagers, Jessie, Calvin and Nicky, all victims of extreme childhoods, running supreme hedonistic riot as they try to work out a way in life.

Manhattan explores how the life of a middle-aged television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.

Follows Callie and Joseph one year after they fell in love, now running a dairy farm and winery, but their romance is threatened when business and family obligations call Joseph back to the city.

The drug-induced utopias of four Coney Island residents are shattered when their addictions run deep.

The lives of several individuals intertwine as they go about their lives in their own unique ways, engaging in acts which society as a whole might find disturbing in a desperate search for human connection.

A young paramedic is paired with a seasoned partner on the night shift in New York revealing a city in crisis. Discovering the chaos firsthand, he is tested with the ethical ambiguity that can be the difference between life and death.

After her husband loses his job, a housewife from a middle-class, conservative family in Calcutta gets a job as a salesperson.

A lack of parental guidance encourages teens in an affluent California town to rebel with substance abuse and casual sex.

A supermarket clerk decides to step in for an absent drug dealer, setting off an explosive, comedic chain of events.

Brandon, a thirty-something man living in New York, eludes intimacy with women but feeds his deepest desires with a compulsive addiction to sex. When his younger sister temporarily moves into his apartment, stirring up bitter memories of their shared painful past, Brandon's life, like his fragile mind, gets out of control.

When strange lights descend on the city of Los Angeles, people are drawn outside like moths to a flame where an extraterrestrial force threatens to swallow the entire human population off the face of the Earth. Now the band of survivors must fight for their lives as the world unravels around them.

A poet falls in love with an art student, who gravitates to his bohemian lifestyle — and his love of heroin. Hooked as much on one another as they are on the drug, their relationship alternates between states of oblivion, self-destruction, and despair.

A young drug dealer watches as his high-rolling life is dismantled in the wake of his cousin's murder, which sees his best friend arrested for the crime.

Malcom's done with his life. Only the noise of Crystal Meth gives him a reason to keep going - everything else it has long regardless. Equipped with a bag full of weapons and self-made bombs, he makes his way to the nearby mall to really stir things up. On his personal war campaign, he not only changes his life radically, but also the fate of other people who are in the wrong place at the same time: a teenager whose favorite pastime is smoking pot in his dreary existence, a housewife, where their best days have been left behind, a greedy businessman whose only desire is to increase his wealth and a depressed pervert.

Riding across Manhattan in a stretch limo during a riot in order to get a haircut, a 28-year-old billionaire asset manager's life begins to crumble.

An old film director, unhappy with the movie he's shooting about a Hungarian circus stranded in Rome during the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, faces divorce from his producer wife and other problems.

David, a struggling comedy writer fresh off from breaking up with his boyfriend, moves from New York City to Sacramento to help his sick mother. Living with his conservative father and much-younger sisters for the first time in ten years, he feels like a stranger in his childhood home. As his mother’s health declines, David frantically tries to extract meaning from this horrible experience and convince everyone (including himself) that he's "doing okay.”

Juggling increasing career success and a growing heroin habit, a television comedy writer attempts to go down a path of improvement.

While dining out with friends, Sy suggests the difficulty of separating comedy from tragedy. To illustrate his point, he tells his guests two parallel stories about Melinda ; both versions have the same basic elements, but one take on her state of affairs leans toward levity, while the other is full of anguish. Each story involves Melinda coping with a recent divorce through substance abuse while beginning a romantic relationship with a close friend's husband.

Two ne’er-do-wells from Quebec travel to New York City with a scheme to get rich quick selling Christmas trees.

A nursing student forced to quit school for family reasons winds up taking a job as a doorman in an elite apartment building in New York City, where he sparks to one of his residents.

Patrick returns to San Francisco for the first time in almost a year to celebrate a momentous event with his old friends. In the process, he must face the unresolved relationships he left behind and make difficult choices about what’s important to him.

Jessica knows exactly what her life is supposed to look like and where it takes her. But then she meets Danny. He has a complicated past and could confuse all their plans. Jessica has to decide.

A recent college graduate decides to sell marijuana on the streets of Manhattan after losing his job at a consulting firm. He soon meets the girl of his dreams. With an unsupportive girlfriend, an increase of clienteles, and the growing threats of being caught or killed, he soon realizes he is in way over his head.

Collin must make it through his final three days of probation for a chance at a new beginning. He and his troublemaking childhood best friend, Miles, work as movers, and when Collin witnesses a police shooting, the two men’s friendship is tested as they grapple with identity and their changed realities in the rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood they grew up in.

In 1990s Los Angeles, a 13-year-old spends his summer navigating between a troubled home life and a crew of new friends he meets at a skate shop.

The four friends Lukas, Julius, Gino and Sanchez are trying to survive the everyday life in Neukölln, Berlin between drugs, gangs, rap, violence and boredom. Until they are one day making a serious decision with serious consequences because of a dead certain plan.

In 1818, high-spirited young Fanny Brawne finds herself increasingly intrigued by the handsome but aloof poet John Keats, who lives next door to her family friends the Dilkes. After reading a book of his poetry, she finds herself even more drawn to the taciturn Keats. Although he agrees to teach her about poetry, Keats cannot act on his reciprocated feelings for Fanny, since as a struggling poet he has no money to support a wife.

Seemingly mild-mannered businessman Edmond Burke visits a fortuneteller and hears a remark that spurs him to leave his wife abruptly and seek what is missing from his life. Encounters with strangers and unsavory people weaken the barriers encompassing his long-suppressed rage, until Edmond explodes in violence.

In the teeming, multicultural metropolis of modern-day London, a seemingly straightforward missing-person case launches a down-at-heel private eye into a dangerous world of religious fanaticism and political intrigue.

An ex-cop and his family are the target of an evil force that is using mirrors as a gateway into their home.

Film chronicles a decade in the life of a young physics student whose absolute faith in the primacy of rationality and science is shaken by tragedy and affairs of the heart.

A troubled actor, a television show runner, and an acclaimed videogame designer find their lives intertwining in mysterious and unsettling ways.

In a futuristic New York known as New Rome, visionary architect Cesar Catilina dreams of building "Megalopolis," a utopian city that redefines society’s limits. Opposing him is the corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero, who clings to power and profit. Between them stands Julia, the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar forces her to choose between loyalty, ambition, and the fate of humanity.

Strippers in Manhattan are being stalked and murdered by a psycho. A hard-nosed police detective and a conflicted ex-boxer-turned-private-eye, hired by the strip club owners, set out to find him before he strikes again.

New York City English professor Axel Freed outwardly seems like an upstanding citizen. But privately Freed is in the clutches of a severe gambling addiction that threatens to destroy him.

Set in the Mojave Desert, the film follows a broken-down comedian playing clubs across the Southwest, working his way to Los Angeles to meet his estranged daughter.

Over the course of three days Ross, a college dropout addicted to crystal-meth, encounters a variety of oddball folks - including a stripper named Nikki and her boyfriend, the local meth producer, The Cook - but all he really wants to do is hook up with his old girlfriend, Amy.

Retreating from life after a tragedy, a man questions the universe by writing to Love, Time and Death. Receiving unexpected answers, he begins to see how these things interlock and how even loss can reveal moments of meaning and beauty.

William Keane is barely able to cope. It has been six months since his six-year-old daughter was abducted from New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal while traveling with him. Repeatedly drawn to the site of the abduction, Keane wanders the bus station, compulsively replaying the events of that fateful day, as if hoping to change the outcome.

A small circle of friends suffering from post-collegiate blues must confront the hard truth about life, love and the pursuit of gainful employment. As they struggle to map out survival guides for the future, the Gen-X quartet soon begins to realize that reality isn't all it's cracked up to be.

A novelist is blinded in a car crash that killed his wife and several years later rediscovers his passion for life and writing when he embarks on an affair with the neglected wife of an indicted businessman.

A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a rush of panic, he steals 'The Goldfinch', a painting that eventually draws him into a world of crime.

Ellie Parker, an aspiring actress from Australia, lives a hectic Hollywood lifestyle, perpetually trying to land the role that will elevate her career. Living with her lothario musician boyfriend, Justin, Ellie is far from happy, finding support primarily from her friend Sam. But when Ellie meets Chris after a minor traffic accident, she sees new potential for both romance and her life in general.

The incredibly spoiled and overprivileged students of Camden College are a backdrop for an unusual love triangle between a drug dealer, a virgin and a bisexual classmate.

Unable to cope with a recent personal tragedy, LA's top celebrity shrink turns into a pothead with no concern for his appearance and a creeping sense of his inability to help his patients.

Brian comes under the addictive spell of a parasite with the ability to induce euphoric hallucinations in its hosts.

Dreams and reality collide as a young woman navigates a tumultuous relationship amid rising social tensions, protests and tragedies in Paris.

Two investigators of paranormal hoaxes, the veteran Dr. Margaret Matheson and her young assistant, Tom Buckley, study the most varied metaphysical phenomena with the aim of proving their fraudulent origins. Simon Silver, a legendary blind psychic, reappears after an enigmatic absence of 30 years to become the greatest international challenge to both orthodox science and professional sceptics. Tom starts to develop an intense obsession with Silver, whose magnetism becomes stronger with each new manifestation of inexplicable events. As Tom gets closer to Silver, tension mounts, and his worldview is threatened to its core.

Theresa, a haunted young woman spiraling in the wake of profound loss, is torn between her fractured emotional state and the reality-altering effects of a potent cannabinoid drug.

On the outskirts of Brooklyn, Frankie, an aimless teenager, suffocates under the oppressive glare cast by his family and a toxic group of delinquent friends. Struggling with his own identity, Frankie begins to scour hookup sites for older men.

Writer Paul Benjamin is nearly hit by a bus when he leaves Auggie Wren's smoke shop. Stranger Rashid Cole saves his life, and soon middle-aged Paul tells homeless Rashid that he wouldn't mind a short-term housemate. Still grieving over his wife's murder, Paul is moved by both Rashid's quest to reconnect with his father and Auggie's discovery that a woman who might be his daughter is about to give birth.

A theater director struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play.

Various citizens of Toronto anxiously await the end of the world, which is occurring at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day.

A man and woman meet and try to have a romantic affair, despite their personal problems and the interference of their disapproving friends.

A dramatic comedy about a self-induced attention-deficit disordered, learning disabled, Tourette's syndrome suffering, balance impaired, ex-alcoholic young man from the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the gold-digging girl who inspires him to try to get it together.

