dmb's - Rented List

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On the sun-drenched island of Haiti at the end of the 1970s, tourists idle away their vacations in the palm-fringed paradise of the beach hotels.

Brenda, Ellen and Sue, three North American women, converge on the island looking for flirtation, relaxation and respite from their mundane jobs and marriages. They find exactly what they are looking for in Legba, an enigmatic local Adonis-like boy, whose beauty and passion captivates them all and who leads them away from the gilded cage of tourism and opens their eyes to the poverty and dangers of living in Haiti in the midst of the "Baby Doc" Duvalier dictatorial regime.

Eight friends gather far a dinner party to watch a passing comet. Unbeknownst to them, this beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime astrological event is about to set off a catastrophic chain of events that will twist their reality beyond all comprehension.

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The 2014 Cannes Palme d'Or winner from Nuri Bilge Ceylan is set in the hilly landscape of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia. A former actor, Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), owns a small hotel cut into the hillside, which he runs with his younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sozen).

He has also inherited local properties, but leaves the business of rent collection to his agent. When a local boy, resentful of his father's humiliation by Aydin's agent, throws a stone at a jeep whilst Aydin and his agent are driving in it, Aydin ducks out of any responsibility or involvement. As the film progresses, the cocoon in which this self-satisfied man has wrapped himself is gradually unravelled. In a series of magnificent set-pieces, Aydin is exposed in his encounters with his wife, sister, and the family of the stone-throwing boy. He is finally brought face-to-face with who he truly is.

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In a vast and opulent hotel, an unnamed man (Giorgio Albertazzi) attempts to persuade a similarly unnamed married woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they have not only met before, but they were also romantically involved and had planned to escape together.

The woman recalls no such encounter and so begins a sensual and philosophical examination into the uncertainty of truth.

At his own risk, Daniel solicits Marek, one of the Eastern European boys that hangs around the Gare du Nord. He invites Marek to his home but when the doorbell rings and it isn't Marek standing there, Daniel realises he has fallen into a trap.

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A compelling docudrama, '24 City' is set in the south-western city of Chengdu where a state-owned factory is being demolished to make way for a complex of luxury flats.

Jia Zhangke's film weaves together the stories of three generations of factory workers, audaciously blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction by subtly combining heartrending real-life interviews with scripted accounts performed by actors (including Joan Chen, The Last Emperor). Epic in scope and beautifully realised, '24 City' is an elegiac look back across 50 years of factory life which pays tribute to the workers and invites reflection on the radical changes taking place in modern China.

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Jake Gyllenhaal plays Adam Bell, a college history professor who is somewhat dissatisfied with his life. One day when watching a movie he spots a bit-part actor who looks exactly like him and begins investigating who this doppelganger is.

Becoming increasingly obsessed, Adam decides he must meet with this mysterious person, but when he does he unearths more than he'd bargained for.

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Mickey (Philip Seymour-Hoffman) makes ends-meet by partaking in petty crime and gambling, with his friend Arthur (John Turturro), and then spending most of it in the local flea-pit bar before stumbling home to his long-suffering wife Jeanie (Christina Hendricks).

When his mentally unstable step-son, Leon, is killed by a co-worker on a construction site - a crime that is quickly covered up and explained away as an 'accident', nobody in the depressed blue collar neighbourhood of God's Pocket is particularly sorry, except of course his own mother. Mickey tries to bury the bad news along with the body, but when Jeanie demands the truth, Mickey finds himself stuck in a struggle between a body he can't bury, a wife he can't please and a debt he can't pay .

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe expands into the cosmos when brash space adventurer Peter Quill steals a coveted orb and becomes the object of a relentless bounty hunt.

To evade his enemies, Quill forges an uneasy truce with Rocket, a gun-toting raccoon; Groot, a tree-like humanoid; the deadly assassin Gamora; and the revenge-driven Drax. But when Quill discovers the true power of the orb, he must rally his ragtag band of misfits for a desperate battle that will decide the fate of the galaxy.

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The story follows the relationship between Roberto and his 17 year old daughter, Alejandra. Roberto is very depressed after his wife Lucia dies in a car accident and decides to move away with his daughter to a new city.

They try hard to adjust to their new life and Alejandro does her best to help, but struggles as she becomes the victim of bullying at her new school. To protect her father, she decides not to tell him anything, but as the bullying gets worse her situation becomes more and more desperate.

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14 year old Maria (Lea Van Acken) is a member of a strict branch of Catholicism that rejects all the reforms that were made in the Church since the 1960s. Maria lives her everyday life in the modern world, yet yearns to follow Jesus fully, to become a saint and go to heaven.

Christian, a boy she meets at school, almost draws Maria away from her goal with an invite to join the school's gospel choir, but her strictly pious mother (Franziska Weisz) pulls her back in line, seeing his tentative approaches as a temptation to sin, along with participating in what she sees as the 'Devil's music'. Told in fourteen individual tableaus that parallel Christ's journey to his crucifixion, 'Stations of the Cross' is both an indictment of fundamentalist faith and the articulation of an impressionable teen's struggle to find her own path in life.

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Deep in the heart of France, a community of farmers spend their days herding sheep, milking cows and pondering contemporary life. Director Raymond Depardon has been filming the farmers for over 10 years gradually gaining their trust and letting his camera roll to capture observations and outbursts.

With wonderful intimacy Depardon creates a film that illuminates the farming experience introducing us to characters such as the Privat brothers who worry that-while their nephew Alain has a nice personality, he 'lacks the soul of a farmer'. Magnum photographer Raymond Depardon is renowned for his documentation of the French countryside. Born into a farming family Depardon first started filming the rural community with his films L'Approche (The Approach) and Le Quotidien (Everyday Life). The two early films were the driving force for Modern Life. With this, the final film in his trilogy, he brings a warmth and depth that will delight all viewers and leave them feeling privileged for a glimpse into these farmers' lives.

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Omar is accustomed to dodging surveillance bullets as be crosses the separation wall every bay to visit his secret love Nadia. But occupied Palestine knows neither simple love nor clear-cut war.

To prove himself to Nadia's family, the sensitive young baker becomes a freedom fighter and must soon face painful choices about life and manhood. When he is captured after a deadly act of resistance, he falls into a cat-and-mouse game with the military police. Suspicion and betrayal jeopardise his longtime trust with friends and accomplices and Omar's feelings become as torn apart as the Palestinian landscape.

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On a suburban street, two masked men seize a young woman. They bind and gag her and take her to an abandoned, soundproofed apartment. She is Alice Creed, daughter of a millionaire. Her kidnappers, the coldly efficient Vic and his younger accomplice Danny, have worked out a meticulous plan.

But Alice is not going to play the perfect victim - she's not giving in without a fight. In a tense power-play of greed, duplicity and survival we discover that sometimes disappearances can be deceptive.

Dwight Evans is a mysterious outsider whose quiet life on the margins is turned upside down when he returns to his childhood home to carry out an act of vengeance. Proving himself an amateur assassin, he winds up in a brutal fight to protect his estranged family.