daniel-phillips's - Rented List

'Equinox Flower' is Yasujirô Ozu first foray into colour cinema and is a gentle observation of intergenerational conflict between a father and his daughter over her impending unapproved marriage.

'Tokyo Twilight' is film focused on family disintegration; it is also darkest masterpiece. Two adult sisters return to the family home and discover their long missing mother living with another man, leading to a destructive path of despair and isolation.

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Made the year before his career defining masterpiece, 'Tokyo Story', 'The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice' is one of Yasujiro Ozu's most beautiful domestic sagas, a subtly piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone.

Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle aged couple, as the wife's city bred sophistication clashes with the husband's small town simplicity, and a generational sea change in the form of their headstrong, modern niece sweeps over their household. Ozu's expert grasp of family dynamics receives one of its most spirited treatments, with a wry, tender humour and an expansiveness that moves the action from the home, to the baseball stadiums and the shops of post-war Tokyo.

When a travelling kabuki troupe brings their show to a seaside port, Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura), an ageing actor, is reunited with his former lover, sake bar owner Oyoshi (Haruki Sugimura), and his illegitimate son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), to the distress of his current mistress Sumiko (Machiko Kyo).

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Said and Khaled are walking time bombs. With explosives strapped to their bodies, the two young Palestinians slip into Israel, planning a suicide mission in Tel Aviv.

Can anything or anyone change their minds? Paradise Now - sweepingly powerful and intricately detailed, highly acclaimed and widely controversial - tells the story of these two lifelong friends and their mission of doom. Hany Abu-Assad directs, shooting this harrowing thriller in locations made equally harrowing by real-life missile attacks, exploding land mines, suspicious Palestinian factions and Israeli occupied forces, and the kidnapping of a crew member. The result is a film that knows its topic up close and provides no easy answers. Instead, Paradise Now lays bare the humanity and the horror for all to see, to ponder...and perhaps to change.

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In the brutal mountains of the Iran/Iraq border, two nomadic teachers, Reeboir and Said, roam the landscape in search of pupils. They carry their blackboards on their backs, sometimes using them as shelter, camouflage, and as shields from gunfire.

Reeboir encounters a group of young border smugglers for whom education has little meaning, whilst Said becomes involved with some old men seeking a safe route across the border to Iraq.

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Strange things are afoot in Bad City. The Iranian ghost town, home to prostitutes, junkies, pimps and other sordid souls, is a place that reeks of death and hopelessness, where a lonely vampire is stalking the towns most unsavory inhabitants.

But when boy meets girl, an unusual love story begins to blossom... blood red.

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It is 1850 in the beautiful, perfectly kept town of Wismar. Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is about to leave on a long journey over the Carpathian Mountains to finalise real estate arrangements with a wealthy nobleman.

His wife Lucy (Isabel Adjani) begs him not to go and is troubled by a strong premonition of danger. Despite her warnings, Jonathan arrives four weeks later at a large, gloomy castle. Out of the mist appears a pale wraith-like figure with a shaven head and deep sunken eyes who identifies himself as Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) The events that transpire slowly convince Harker that he is in the midst of a vampire. What he doesn't know, however, is the magnitude of danger he, his wife and his town are about to experience as victims of the Nosferatu.

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The first sound-film by one of the greatest of all filmmaker's, Vampyr offers a sensual immediacy that few, if any, works of cinema can claim to match.

Legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer leads the viewer, as though guided in a trance, through a realm akin to a wakingdream, a zone positioned somewhere between reality and the supernatural.

Five years in the making, 'Eraserhead' contains all of the trademark attributes of a Lynch film - haunting visuals, an ethereal score, unsettling sound design, and, most notably, a black sense of humour - creating a world onscreen thatis exhilarating, terrifying, and truly unique.

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Taking an ill-advised detour en route to California, the Carter family soon run into trouble when their campervan breaks down in the middle of the desert. Stranded, the family find themselves at the mercy of a group of monstrous cannibals lurking in the surrounding hills.

With their lives under threat, the Carters have no choice but to fight back by any means necessary.

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Deep in the basement of an abandoned church, once run by a sinister religious sect, lies a strange bottle of green liquid being investigated by a group of local theoretic physics students.

But as the night draws in the students soon realise that the strange relic holds a dark and powerful force beyond their control. A force that could well be the essence of pure evil: the remains of Satan himself.

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Easy-going Mari Collingwood (Sandra Peabody) and her fun-loving friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) are on their way to a Bloodlust concert to celebrate Mari's 17th birthday when three escaped convicts kidnap and torture them.

But Mari and Phyllis are fighters, and although they are drugged and beaten into unconsciousness, stuffed into a car trunk and driven to the woods for even more brutality, they are still alive...but for how long?

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When gorgeous young French model Ann-Marie (Penny Irving) appears naked in public, she is snatched away by her new boyfriend, Mark E.

Desade (Robert Tayman) and hurled into the secret women's prison run by his parents - a disgraced prison governess (Barbara Markham) and a blind, senile judge (Patrick Barr). Now she and her fellow inmates face the starkest of choices - submit or die. But Ann-Marie gambles everything on a third option - escape...

Grieving for the loss of their infant son, a couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) retreat to the solace of their remote woodland cabin to repair their troubled marriage. But once there, nature itself turns against them and a terrifying journey into violence and chaos begins.