djaybee's - Rented List

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Jia Zhangke's eighth feature is an intimate yet epic drama spanning several decades which charts the impact of China's move towards capitalism on the lives of one family.

Divided into three parts (set in 1999, 2014 and Australia in 2025), 'Mountains May Depart' follows the life of Shen Tao (played by Jia's regular collaborator Zhao Tao) and her family through 26 tumultuous years. Perhaps his most ambitious film yet, Jia's film is an astute, humane study of how the emergent culture of capitalist materialism and the forces of globalisation have impacted on Chinese society and family life.

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Author turned private detective, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), struggles to make ends meet as he flitters away all the money he earns on gambling, barely able to pay child support for his son.

After his father passes away his mother (Kiki Kirin) seems to have moved on, but family tensions are high with both Ryota and his sister believing each other is taking advantage of their mother. When a typhoon hits, holed-up in his mother's house with his estranged wife and son, Ryota attempts to rekindle his relationships with his family. A sensitive and powerful story of family ties remade, 'After the Storm' stands with the best of Kore-eda's work.

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A sailor, Farrel, leaves his ship and begins a lengthy journey to wintry Tierra del Fuego's interior, to an isolated village and family that he hasn't seen in years. The route seems familiar to him, and we gradually piece together his relationship with the people and community he finds there.

From the opening sequences on Farrel's ship, to the spectacular harshness of his destination, Alonso is meticulous in mapping the sights and sounds of the landscape and Farrel's personal journey into the past.

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Derek Jarmam struggled for seven years to bring his portrait of the seventeenth-century Italian artist Michelangelo de Caravaggio (Nigel Terry / Dexter Fletcher) to the screen.

The result was well worth the wait, and was greeted with critical acclaim: a freely dramatised portrait of the controversial artist and a powerful mediation on sexuality, criminality and art - a new refreshing take on the usual biopic. The film centres on an imagined love-triangle between Caravaggio, his friend and model Ranuccio (Sean Bean), and Ranuccio's low-life partner Lena (Tilda Swinton). Conjuring some of the artist's most famous paintings through elaborate and beautifully photographed tableaux vivants, those works are woven into the fabric of the story, providing a starting point for its characters and narrative episodes.

Margherita is a film director who quickly finds out that her lead Hollywood actor (John Turturro) is rather difficult to work with. If his demands weren't enough, her mother's health has recently declined and Maigherita struggles to find die balance and harmony between work and family life.

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A marriage that has fallen on hard times is further tested by the couple's implication in a murder. Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair) is a music hall chanteuse married to her pianist husband Maurice (Bernard Blier).

Keen to get ahead, Jenny leaps at the chance when an ageing wealthy businessman (Charles Dullin) offers her the chance of some gigs. However, when she agrees to a meeting at his home and he is found dead later in the evening - Maurice's untamed jealousy is in the frame. A Maigret-esque detective, Antoine, played by Louis Jouvet leaves no stone unturned in his exceedingly private investigations of the down-at-heel showbiz couple's sad, tempestuous life. 'Quai des Orfevres' was Henri-Georges Clouzot's first film in four years. He had been banned from film making following the controversy surrounding the release Le Corbeau.

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'Bloodsucking Freaks' takes you to a bizarre Off-Broadway theatre of the macabre, operated by a deranged impresario. Inside, sadistic entertainments are staged for his audience's pleasure, including tortures, dismemberments, and other gruesome acts which appear to be faked.

When people begin disappearing off the streets of Manhattan, the twisted truth begins to chillingly sink in: these horrifying bloodcurdling acts are not theatrical at all. They are real!

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Winner of the 'Best International Film' award at the 2012 Edinburgh Film Festival, this astonishing debut feature is an enigmatic portrait of the alienation and disillusionment widespread amongst young people in contemporary China.

Filmed in elegant long takes, "Here, Then" interweaves the lives of a cast of rootless characters linked by chance encounters, by their sexual obsessions, and by the loss of a mobile phone.
Mao's thoughtful and alluring film is characterised by careful pacing, stunning cinematography and a stand-out central performance from actress Huang Tang Yijia. Its subtly-developing narrative powerfully conveys the longing for escape from ordinary life, to another here, another then.

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Five carnival workers are kidnapped the night before Halloween and held hostage in a large compound. At the mercy of their captors, they are forced to play a twisted game of life or death called 31.

For the next 12 hours, they must fight for their lives against an endless parade of homicidal maniacs.

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Edward Yang's multi-award-winning film looks at several turbulent weeks in the life of the Jian family. Husband and father NJ (Nien-Jen Wu) is a partner in a failing software company, which might just save itself by teaming up with an innovative Japanese games designer.

Meanwhile his wife Min-Min (Elaine Jin) has gone off to a mountain retreat with a dubious guru, his teenage daughter Ting Ting (Kelly Lee) is getting her first, rough lessons in love, his young son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) is asking difficult questions and getting into trouble at school - and his mother-in-law has suffered a stroke and lies in a coma. In the middle of all the confusion NJ runs into his childhood sweetheart Sherry, the girl he jilted twenty years earlier, and starts to wonder about starting over.

Divided into three related short stories, feature is Alain Resnais' tribute to three of France's most influential filmmakers - Geroges Melies, Marcel L'Herbier and Eric Rohmer.

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Fernando, a solitary ornithologist, is looking for endangered black storks along a remote river in northern Portugal, when he is swept away by the rapids.

Rescued by a couple of Chinese pilgrim girls on their way to Santiago de Compostela, he plunges into a dark, eerie forest, trying to get back on track. But as he encounters unexpected uncanny obstacles and people who put him to the test, Fernando is driven to extreme, transformative actions. Gradually he becomes a different man: - inspired, multifaceted, and finally enlightened.

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Peter Strickland's startlingly original directorial debut centres around Katalin Varga (Hilda Péter), who, after being banished by her husband and her village, is left with no other choice than to set out on a quest to find the real father of her son, Orban (Norbert Tankó).

Taking Orban with her under another pretence, Katalin travels through the Carpathians where she decides to re-open a sinister chapter from her past and take revenge. The hunt leads her to a place, she prayed eleven years prior, she would never set foot in again...

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Summer 1910 on the coast of France. Several tourists have vanished.

Inspectors Machin (Didier Després) and Malfoy Cyril Rigaux soon gather that the centre of these mysterious disappearances must be Slack Bay, where lives a very odd fishing family, the Bruforts and their eldest son, nicknamed Ma Loute (Brandon Lavieville). Every summer, the bourgeois Van Peteghems visit their villa by the sea in the same place and a peculiar love story starts between Ma Loute and the young and mischievous Billie van Peteghem (Raph). Confusion and puzzlement descends on both families, as events spiral to the bizarre and beyond.

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Jayson Bend - International Super Spy. He's sexy, he's highly capable...

and he likes men! When the owner of the largest global hair salon chain threatens to launch a satellite that would turn him into the most powerful man in the world, it falls on Jayson's broad shoulders to thwart his plans, It could be his toughest assignment yet, and when he teams up with Swiss agent Alec DeCoque things start to get very sticky indeed. Look no further world, your first gay super-spy has arrived and he ain't taking any prisoners!