Biomedical Research - Dramas

Coma
Director: Michael Crichton
Country of origin and year: USA, 1978
Starring: Michael Douglas, Rip Torn and Geneviève Bujold
When her best friend and aerobics partner emerges in a vegetative state from a routine abortion, Dr. Susan Wheeler does some digging and eventually discovers the Jefferson Institute, a mysterious, experimental facility in which vegetative patients are stored en masse, suspended from the ceiling by wires threaded through their long bones, to reduce the cost of long-term care. A shadowy assailant begins to stalk Susan just as she uncovers the link between the Jefferson Institute and the comas at Boston Memorial, setting the stage for climactic suspense scenes involving morgues, malpractice and endless institutional corridors.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077355

Extreme Measures
Director: Michael Apted
Country of origin and year: USA, 1996
Starring: Hugh Grant, Gene Hackman, Sarah Jessica Parker
Guy Luthan, a British doctor working in New York City, is very puzzled by a patient brought to the emergency room one night. Naked, disoriented, and bearing a hospital bracelet and a fresh surgical scar, the mystery man is suffering from a baffling variety of symptoms. Though he dies not long after he's admitted, Luthan cannot get the patient out of his mind. When he asks to see the records on the patient a few days later, he is told they no longer exist, and the more he digs, the more he is convinced that someone knows something they are not telling.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116259/

Anatomy (original title, Anatomie)
Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Country of origin and year: Germany, 2000
Starring: Franka Potente, Benno Fürmann and Anna Loos
When Paula Henning learns that she's been accepted to a highly competitive internship at a Heidelberg research institution, she is ecstatic. However, she stumbles across sinister activities when a recent acquaintance turns up on her dissection table, his blood the consistency of rubber. Studious to the extreme, Paula investigates his death with scientific determination — despite the flirtations of handsome fellow student Caspar and the feel-good urgings of Gretchen, her sexually promiscuous but utterly brilliant roommate. Just as Paula is preparing to expose the existence of the Anti-Hippocratic Society, a Nazi-affiliated group of medical malcontents, they strike close to home.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0187696/

Who Killed Bambi (Original Title: Qui A Tue Bambi)
Director: Gilles Marchand
Country of origin and year: France, 2003
Starring: Sophie Quinton, Laurent Lucas and Catherine Jacob
Isabelle, a beautiful nursing student, is starting her internship at a prestigious hospital. She meets Dr. Philip there and feels attracted to him from the beginning. She begins to suffer from strange fainting; her legs do not support her, so he calls her Bambi:. Patients mysteriously start to disappear from their rooms; so Bambi and Dr. Philip start a dangerous paranoid game, in order to catch the probable killer.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0326036/

The Alchemists
Director: Peter Smith
Country of origin and year: UK, 1999
Starring: Edward Hardwicke, Ruth Gemmell and Aneirin Hughes
Posing as a patent lawyer, Connor Molloy sets out to prove that the powerful firm of Bentik-Lange Pharmaceuticals was responsible for the death of his father. He is aided in this endeavor by Julia Bannerman, the daughter of a research scientist.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219487/

First Do No Harm
Director: Jim Abrahams
Country of origin and year: USA, 1997
Starring: Meryl Streep, Fred Ward, Seth Adkins, Tom Butler, and Allison Janney
When Lori Reimuller learns that her young son Robbie has epilepsy, she first trusts the judgment of the hospital staff in how best to bring it under control. As Robbie's health slides radically downhill, however, she becomes frustrated and desperate, and so does her own research into the existing literature on treatments. When she decides to try an alternative treatment called the Ketogenic Diet, she is met with narrow-minded resistance from Robbie's doctor, who is prepared to take legal action to prevent Lori from removing him from the hospital.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118526/

Lorenzo's Oil
Director: George Miller
Country of origin and year: USA, 1992
Starring: Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon and Peter Ustinov
Until about the age of 7, Lorenzo Odone was a normal child. After then, strange things began to happen to him: he would have blackouts, memory lapses, and other strange mental phenomenons. He is eventually diagnosed as suffering from ALD: an extremely rare incurable degenerative brain disorder. Frustrated at the failings of doctors and medicine in this area, the Odones begin to educate themselves in the hope of discovering something which can halt the progress of the disease.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104756/

Gifted Hands
Director: Thomas Carter
Country of origin and year: USA, 2009
Starring: Ele Bardha, Loren Bass and Geoffrey Beauchamp
Growing up in a broken home amongst poverty and prejudice, Ben Carson did not have much of a chance and his grades suffered and his temper flared. Despite this, his mother never lost faith in him. Insisting he follow the opportunities she never had, she helped to grow his imagination, intelligence and, most importantly, his belief in himself. That faith would be his gift - the thing that would drive him to follow his dream of becoming one of the world's leading neurosurgeons.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1295085/

Extraordinary Measure
Director: Tom Vaughan
Country of origin and year: USA, 2010
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Keri Russell and Harrison Ford
A Portland couple have two children with Pompe disease, a genetic anomaly that kills most before a child's tenth birthday. The husband, John, contacts Robert Stonehill, a researcher in Nebraska who has done innovative research for an enzyme treatment. John and his wife Aileen raise money to help Stonehill's research and the required clinical trials. However, they are running out of time and the researchers must race against time to help the children.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1244659

I Am Legend
Director: Francis Lawrence
Country of origin and year: USA – 2007
Starring: Will Smith, Alice Braga and Charlie Tahan
Robert Neville is a scientist who was unable to stop the spread of a man-made, incurable virus. Immune, Neville is now the last human survivor in what is left of New York City and perhaps the world. For three years, Neville has faithfully sent out daily radio messages, desperate to find any other survivors. But he is not alone. Mutant victims of the plague lurk in the shadows and watch Neville's every move. Perhaps mankind's last, best hope, Neville is driven by only one remaining mission: to find a way to reverse the effects of the virus using his own immune blood.
Internet Movie Database webpage: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/

Something the Lord Made
Director: Joseph Sargent
Country of origin and year: USA, 2004
Starring: Alan Rickman, Mos Def, Gabrielle Union
Alfred Blalock, a cardiologist, leaves Vanderbilt for Johns Hopkins taking with him his lab technician, Vivien Thomas. Thomas, an African-American without a college degree, is a gifted mechanic and tool-maker with hands splendidly adept at surgery. Blalock and Thomas take on the challenge of blue babies and invent bypass surgery. After trials on dogs, their first patient is baby Eileen, sure to die without the surgery. In defiance of custom and Jim Crow, Blalock brings Thomas into the surgery to advise him, but when Life Magazine and kudos come, Thomas is excluded. Will he receive his due?
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386792

Wit
Director: Mike Nichols
Country of origin and year: USA, 2001
Starring: Emma Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, Audra McDonald
Vivian Bearing is a professor of English literature whose life takes a turn when she is diagnosed with cancer. She undergoes various chemotherapy treatments to treat her disease, but health continues to deteriorate. As she grows increasingly ill, Vivian agrees to undergo more tests and experimental treatments, even though she realizes the doctors treating her, see her less as someone to save and more as a guinea pig for their treatments.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243664

And the Band Played On
Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Country of origin and year: USA, 1993
Starring: Matthew Modine, Alan Alda
Dr. Don Francis, an immunologist with experience in eradicating smallpox and containing the Ebola virus, joins the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to try and understand AIDS. They also have deal with bureaucracy and a government that doesn't seem to care. The gay community in San Francisco is divided on the nature of the disease but also what should be done about it.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106273/

Awakenings
Director: Penny Marshall
Country of origin and year: UK, 1991
Starring: Robert de Niro, Robin Williams, Julie Kavner
A new doctor finds himself with a ward full of catatonic patients who have been in the same state for decades with not hope of any cure. When he finds a possible chemical cure he gets permission to try it on one of them. When the first patient awakes, he is now an adult having gone into a catatonic state in his early teens. The patient and their family must adjust to the changes.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099077/

The Constant Gardener
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Country of origin and year: UK, 2005
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston
In a remote area of Northern Kenya, activist Tessa Quayle is found brutally murdered. Tessa's companion, a doctor, appears to have fled the scene, and the evidence points to a crime of passion. Members of the British High Commission in Nairobi assume that Tessa's widower, their mild-mannered and unambitious colleague Justin Quayle, will leave the matter to them. They could not be more wrong. Haunted by remorse and jarred by rumors of his late wife's infidelities, Quayle surprises everyone by embarking on a personal odyssey that will take him across three continents.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387131/

Miss Evers' Boys
Director: Joseph Sargent
Country of origin and year: USA, 1997
Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Alfre Woodard, Von Coulter
In 1932 Macon County, Alabama, the federal government launched into a medical study called The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Blacks with Syphilis. The study selected 412 black men infected with the disease and faked long-term treatment, while really only giving them placebos and liniments, to see if they reacted differently to the disease than white men. When the experiment was discontinued 40 years later, only 127 of the original study group were left alive.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119679/

In Vitro
Director: Tom Lloyd
Country of origin and year: UK, 2013
This film tells the story of Rachel, who is in her 60s and who had a high-profile and controversial career as a scientist. She discovered a way to make stem cells differentiate into sperm and egg cells. She decided to use own cells in an experimental attempt to see if these ‘artificial gametes’ could result in a healthy pregnancy. This caused a huge media storm, and generated concern about the health of her child, who was closely monitored throughout her life. However, her daughter diet at 35 from leukaemia. Rachel fears that Lilian, Sofia’s daughter, may in turn come under scrutiny as the authorities try to establish whether artificial gametes caused Sofia’s illness.

The Skin I Live In (Original Title: "La piel que habito”)
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Country of origin and year: UK, 2011
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Jan Cornet
In honor of his late wife who died in a flaming car accident, scientist, Dr. Robert Ledgard, is trying to synthesize the perfect skin which can withstand burns, cuts or any other kind of damage. As he gets closer to perfecting this skin on his flawless patient, the scientific community starts growing skeptical and his past is revealed that shows how his patient is closely linked to tragic events he would like to forget.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1189073/

A Private Matter
Director: Joan Micklin Silver
Country of origin and year: USA, 1992
Starring: Sissy Spacek, Aidan Quinn, Estelle Parsons
Sherri and her husband, Bob, are happily married and eagerly awaiting the birth of their child when doctors tell the couple that the pain medication Sherri has been prescribed has most likely deformed their unborn baby. Sherri faces both legal and personal attacks as she sparked a firestorm of controversy with her determination to obtain an abortion.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105176

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Director: Victor Fleming
Country of origin and year: UK,1941
Starring: Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner
Gentle Dr. Jekyll experiments with human nature, believing that each person has both good and evil sides that can be brought forth chemically. Jekyll tests a serum on himself, releasing his vicious alter ego, Mr. Hyde, on 19th-century London. Prowling the town, Hyde ventures to a music hall and encounters Ivy, whom he takes forcibly as his mistress. When the serum's effects wear off, Jekyll vows never to take it again. But Hyde is not gone for good.
Internet Movie Database webpage: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033553/