ectonplasm's - Rented List

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Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson are wonderful together in this wickedly funny look at modern romance based on Nora Ephron's acerbic best-selling novel and directed by Mike Nichols. Streep plays Rachel, a successful food writer who puts love and motherhood ahead of her career.

Nicholson plays Mark, a woman-chasing newspaper columnist who can't quite give up his old tricks. She lives in New York. He lives in Washington, D.C. And if all those complications won't give a relationship Heartburn, nothing will!

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Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) a naive writer of pulp westerns, arrives in Vienna to meet his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) but finds that Lime has apparently been killed in a suspicious accident.

Martins, too, curious for his own good, hears contradictory stories about the circumstances of Limes' death and as witnesses disappear he finds himself chased by unknown assailants. Complicating matters are the sardonic Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), head of the British forces, and Limes' stage actress mistress, Anna (Alida Valli). Will Martin's curiosity lead him to discover things about his old friend that he'd rather not know?

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When Ivan (Fernando Guillen) jilts long-time lover, actress Pepa (Carmen Maura), she plans her suicide; lacing her gazpacho soup with barbiturates. She is, however saved by her best friend Candela (Maria Barranco), a fugitive from the law.

Further adding to the chaos, Ivan's son (Antonio Banderas) and his fiance Marisa (Rossy de Palma) turn up at the apartment. Bored with the situation, Marisa inadvertently ingests the gazpacho and as she blissfully snoozes, her fiance inaugurates an affair with Carmen's fugitive friend.

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A gallery of high-living lowlifes will stop at nothing to get their sweaty hands on a jewel-encrusted falcon. Detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) wants to find out why - and who'll take the fall for his partner's murder.

An all-star cast (including Sydney Greenstreet, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr.) joins Bogart in this cracking mystery masterwork written for the screen (from Dashiell Hammett's novel) and directed by John Huston.

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Four ordinary men in two canoes navigate a river they only know as a line on a map, taking on a wilderness they only think they understand.

Deliverance, written by James Dickey based on his novel, surges with the urgency of masterful storytelling, like Georgia's Chattooga River along which it was shot. Equally masterful is the portrayal of each man's change of character under stress, harrowingly enacted by award winners Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox. Director John Boorman sets us on the knife-edge of survival - and draws us in with the irresistible force of a raging current.

Jefferies (James Stewart), a photographer with a broken leg, takes up the fine art of spying on his Greenwich Village neighbours during a summer heat wave. But things really hot up when he suspects one neighbour (Raymond Burr) of murdering his invalid wife and burying the body in a flower garden.

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When Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) reunites with his first crush, one of the most influential women in the world, Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron), he charms her with his self-deprecating humour and his memories of her youthful idealism.

As she prepares to make a run for the Presidency, Charlotte hires Fred as her speechwriter and sparks fly.

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Theodore Decker is 13 years old when his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The tragedy changes the course of his life, sending him on a stirring odyssey of grief and guilt, reinvention and redemption, and even love.

Through it all, he holds on to one tangible piece of hope from that terrible day... a painting of a tiny bird chained to its perch.

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Tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) half-jokingly muses about killing his wife with a stranger he meets on a train, unhinged playboy Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), who'd prefer his father be deceased. In theory, each could murder the other's victim. Crisscross. No motive. No clues. No problem...

except: Bruno takes the idea seriously, with deadly consequences.

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From Robert Eggers, the visionary filmmaker behind the modern horror masterpiece 'The Witch', comes this hypnotic and hallucinatory tale of two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890's.

As an approaching storm threatens to sweep them from the rock and strange apparitions emerge from the fog, each man begins to suspect that the other has become dangerously unmoored.

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Painter Marianne (Noemie Merlant) is commissioned by an affluent countess to paint the wedding portrait of her sheltered but headstrong daughter Héloïse (Adele Haenel).

While posing as her hired companion, Marianne is instructed to complete the portrait in secret, observing Héloïse by day and painting her by night. However, as the two women grow closer, their intimacy and attraction begins to blossom, paving the way for a simmering, star-crossed romance.

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Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen) is a man so introverted and insecure that he has developed the ability to blend perfectly into the background of any given situation, regardless of the personality or even ethnicity of the people around him.

But when he inadvertently becomes famous as "the human chameleon" after the media takes too keen an interest in his therapy sessions with Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow), Zelig is faced with an unprecedented challenge: how do you fade into the background when the spotlight is firmly upon you?

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Writer-director Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) has crafted a 'Little Women' that draws on both the classic novel and the writings of Louisa May Alcott, and unfolds as the author's alter ego, Jo March, reflects back and forth on her fictional life.

In Gerwig's take, the beloved story of the March sisters - four young women each determined to live life on their own terms - is both timeless and timely. Portraying Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth March, the film stars Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, with Timothee Chalamet as their neighbour Laurie, Laura Dern as Marmee, and Meryl Streep as Aunt March.

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Career con man Roy (Ian McKellen) sets his sights on his latest mark, recently widowed Betty (Helen Mirren), who's worth millions. And he means to take it all.

But as the two grow closer, what should have been another simple swindle becomes a high-stakes game of cat and mouse in this suspenseful drama about the secrets people keep and the lies they live.

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Ex-military investigator Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) leaps off the pages of Lee Child's bestselling novel and onto the big screen in the explosive thriller that critics are calling "a superior thriller".

When an unspeakable crime is committed, all evidence points to the suspect in custody who offers up a single note in defence: "Get Jack Reacher!". The law has its limits, but Reacher does not when his fight for the truth pits him against an unexpected enemy with a skill for violence and a secret to keep.