griggs's - Rented List

Show moreShow less

'American History X' unfolds through the eyes of Danny (Edward Furlong), whose older brother Derek (Edward Norton) is seeking retribution for their father's murder. Full of anger, Derek becomes the charismatic leader of a local white power movement.

Despite his intelligence, Derek's hateful actions culminates in a brutal murder and lead to his imprisonment. Three years later Derek's mother Doris (Beverly D'Angelo), his girlfriend Stacey (Fairuza Balk) and Danny await his release. Unbeknownst to all of them however, Derek is a changed man. Fresh from prison and ashamed of his past, he is now in a race to save his brother and family from the violence he has brought down on them.

Show moreShow less

Luis Bunuel's visceral depiction of life in Mexico's slums stunned audiences at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951, winning Best Director and relaunching the filmmaker's career after a twenty-year hiatus.

The film tells the story of an unloved teenage boy, Pedro (Alfonso Mejía), who fights to turn his life around against the circumstances of extreme poverty and the sinister influence of an older boy, El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo).

Show moreShow less

In James L. Brooks' quirky, romantic comedy, three ambitious workaholics are set loose in a network TV newsroom where their professional and personal lives become hopelessly cross-wired. Tom (William Hurt) is the modern anchorman, smooth, handsome and a bit dumb.

Jane (Holly Hunter) is his driven, brilliant producer, determined to turn Tom into a real newsman. And Aaron (Albert Brooks) is a seasoned, totally uncharismatic reporter who can't stand Tom's instant success on-camera or with Jane. It all adds up to one explosively funny romantic triangle.

Show moreShow less

From acclaimed director Steve McQueen comes the incredible true story of one man's fight for survival and freedom. It is 1841 and Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.

Stripped of his identity and deprived of all dignity, Northup is purchased by ruthless plantation owner Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbertder) and must find the strength within to survive. In his twelfth year in captivity, a chance meeting with a Canadian abolitionist (Brad Pitt) forever alters his life.

Show moreShow less

After Being There was published, author Jerzy Kosinski got a telegram from its lead character Chance the Gardner: "Available in my garden or outside of it". Kosinski dialled the accompanying telephone number and Peter Sellers answered.

Sellers indeed got the part and gave an indelible performance in this modern comedy classic. Isolated all his life in a Washington DC townhouse, Chance knows only what he's seen on TV. Cast into the world, he stumbles into the inner circle of governmental power brokers eager for "sage wisdom". As Chance might say, you'll like to watch

Show moreShow less

It's 1948 and Los Angeles is booming, but Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington) has seen better days. He has just been fired and his house payments are due, so when DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore) offers him a seemingly harmless job he jumps at the chance.

All he has to do is track down the elusive Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals), a mysterious beauty known to keep company on the wrong side of town. Soon he finds himself implicated in two murders and is forced to call upon an old friend, Mouse (Don Cheadle), who is all too familiar with the violent world Easy has landed himself in. Slowly drawn deeper and deeper into a web of blackmail, dirty cops and even dirtier politicians, the ways out for Easy become harder and harder to find...

Attorney Ned Racine's life coasts along in neutral - until he meets a siren in white (with a well-to-do husband) named Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner). Ned (William Hurt) knows Matty's the kind of woman a man would kill to be with. So he does.

Show moreShow less

L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) takes on a blackmail case...and follows a trail peopled with murderers, pornographers, nightclub rogues, the spoiled rich and more.

But Raymond Chandler's legendary gumshoe solves it in hard-boiled style - and style is what 'The Big Sleep' is all about.

In 1959, Kit (Martin Sheen) who has killed several people, and his new girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek), who watched him do it, are adrift in a double fantasy of crime and punishment across South Dakota and Montana. They're playing make-believe but the bullets and bloodshed are very real...

Show moreShow less

Melodrama casts noirish shadows in this portrait of maternal sacrifice from Hollywood master Michael Curtiz.

Its iconic performance by Joan Crawford as Mildred, a single mother hell-bent on freeing her children from the stigma of economic hardship, solidified Crawford's career comeback and gave the actor her only Oscar. But as Mildred pulls herself up by the bootstraps, first as an unflappable waitress and eventually as the well-heeled owner of a successful restaurant chain, the ingratitude of her materialistic firstborn (a diabolical Ann Blyth) becomes a venomous serpent's tooth, setting in motion an endless cycle of desperate overtures and heartless recriminations. Recasting James M. Cain's rich psychological novel as a murder mystery, this bitter cocktail of blind parental love and all-American ambition is both unremittingly hard-boiled and sumptuously emotional.

Show moreShow less

When her friend Javi lures her back into the field for the first time since a devastating tornado encounter, storm chaser Kate crosses paths with Tyler, a charming daredevil with a thirst for tornado-tracking adventures.

Kate's caution clashes with Tyler's risk-taking, but as storm season intensifies, they'll need to team up to tame, and survive, an unprecedented outbreak of destructive tornadoes.

Show moreShow less

Nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall makes her sizzling screen debut in the first of 4 films she made opposite Humphrey Bogart. he plays a cynical American expatriate swept up in the fighting of the French resistance - and swept off his feet by an alluring young drifter - Bacall.

Set on the island of Martinique in 1940, the film features smouldering performances from the legendary couple.

Show moreShow less

They say crime doesn't pay. Private detective Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) knows better.

The fat wad of folding money warming his breast pocket is the kind of thing that keeps him going through thick and thicker as he wades chin deep into a mystery involving a missing necklace and a missing hoodlum's moll named Velma.

Show moreShow less

Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas star in this quintessential film noir which catapulted Mitchum into superstardom and set the standard for the genre for years to come.

When Kathie Moffett (Greer) shoots her admirer, Whit Sterling (Douglas), a big-time gambler, and absconds with $40,000 of his money, Starling hires private detective Jeff Bailey (Mitchum) to find her. Bailey leaves New York and catches up with Kathie in Mexico. Kathie denies taking the money and after falling for her charms, Bailey notifies Sterling that he could not find her.

Show moreShow less

Ernest Hemingway s spare, laconic short story about two professional killers and their encounter with a mysteriously unresisting victim was significantly expanded into this all-time film noir classic, which Hemingway said was the first adaptation of his work that he really admired.

As washed-up boxer turned hitman victim Ole 'Swede' Andreson, Burt Lancaster made his screen debut, and was catapulted to instant stardom, not least for the screen chemistry that he showed opposite sultry Ava Gardner, whose Kitty Collins is the very personification of the femme fatale. German émigré Robert Siodmak was one of the filmmakers who helped create film noir, and Elwood Bredell s high-contrast cinematography, all harsh lighting and long shadows, elevates the film far above a conventional crime drama. But even on that level it s a first-rate demonstration of how to maintain narrative tension, with the flashback structure withholding crucial details until almost the very end.