itpworld's - Rented List

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The most savagely subversive film by the iconoclastic auteur Luchino Visconti employs the mechanics of deliriously stylized melodrama to portray Nazism's total corruption of the soul.

In the wake of Hitler's ascent to power, the wealthy industrialist von Essenbeck family and their associates - including the scheming social climber Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), the conniving matriarch Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), and the cruelly deviant heir Martin (Helmut Berger) - descend into a self-destructive spiral of decadence, greed, perversion, and allconsuming hatred as they vie for power, over the family business and over one another.

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Out Of Africa follows the true life story of Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep), an amazingly strong-willed woman who moves from Denmark to run a coffee plantation with her philandering husband (Klaus Maria Brandauer) in Kenya around 1914.

To her astonishment she soon discovers herself falling in love with the land, its people and a mysterious British adventurer and idealist (Robert Redford).

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Eliane (Catherine Deneuve) is a wealthy French plantation owner living in Indochina in the 1930's with her father and adopted native daughter Camille (Linh Dan Pham).

She has a brief affair with a young officer, Jean-Baptiste (Vincent Perez), but after she has ended it, to her dismay discovers that Camille is madly in love with the young man. Eliane is able to arrange to have him transferred and Camille subsequently gets married. However, Camille never loses her love for Jean-Baptiste and finally sets off across the country to find him.

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Six years after 'Germany Year Zero', Roberto Rossellini returned to Germany to make this noir-influenced examination of solitude, alienation, and the crisis of moral values in contemporary life.

Loosely based on Stefan Zweig's novel Angst, Fear explores the inner turmoil of a woman pushed to the edge through the anxiety caused by her infidelity. Ingrid Bergman stars as Irene, the wife of a prominent German scientist, Albert Wagner (Mathias Wieman). Irene has been engaged in an illicit affair which she goes to great pains to hide in order to keep her husband blissfully unaware. However, when her lover's jealous ex-girlfriend, Johanna (Renate Mannhardt) learns of the relationship and proceeds to sadistically extort her, Irene's life soon spirals out of control.

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Oiao (the extraordinary Zhao Tao) lives in a depressed mining town. Her boyfriend, Bin (Liao Fan), is a dashing gangster who works for a corrupt property developer. After his boss is murdered, Bin ascends in rank within the Jianghu (a criminal brotherhood) but finds himself vulnerable to rivals.

When they both are arrested, Qiao makes a fateful decision: she takes the blame to save Bin. After five years in prison, she emerges to find her world has transformed. Her former associates have moved into legitimate businesses, while Bin has found another woman. Qiao seeks revenge, but, more importantly, she searches for a new identity in a changing China - a search that will take her to Three Gorges Dam and toward a powerful revelation.

Redford stars as Joe Turner, a junior analyst in the C.I.A., scrutinising published texts from around the world for coded messages. But once he discovers an unusual anomaly, his own existence comes crashing down, with every error carrying potentially fatal consequences.

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This enthralling, erotic tale of a young millionaire and his mysterious bride is bewitching, exciting and beautiful.

Written and directed by legendary cinematic genius Francois Truffaut and featuring European superstars Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo, 'Mississippi Mermaid' is nothing less than breathtaking. Beauty is by no means rare on the lush, tropical Isle de Reunion. yet when island resident and tobacco tycoon Louis Mahe first meets Julie Rouselle - his mail order fiancée - he's completely enraptured by her radiance. But it soon becomes clear that Julie is hiding a dark secret. And when she disappears without a trace, Louis vows to stop at nothing to find her - a resolution that lures him into a tangled web of relentless obsession, uncontrollable passion, and ultimately...cold-blooded murder!

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Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani), an honest woodworker, falls in love with Marie (Simone Signoret), the moll of minor crook Roland (William Sabatier). Gangster boss Felix Leca (Claude Dauphin) orders Georges and Roland to fight a duel to the death over the girl.

Felix then pins the blame for Roland's death on Georges' boyhood chum, Raymond (Raymond Bussieres), knowing that the woodworker will nobly accept the blame; this will leave Marie alone, which is what lustful Felix has wanted all along. When Georges learns he's been set up as a dupe, he plots his revenge. Based on the true-life Leca-Manda scandal, 'Casque D'Or' brilliantly mixes violence with tenderness to capture the brutality of the French underworld and the tragedy of doomed love.

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Filip (Jerzy Stuhr), a clerk in a small Polish town, buys an 8mm camera to film the baby his wife (Malgorzata Zabkowska) is expecting. His bosses take an interest in it and commision him to film the company's 25th anniversary celebrations.

When the result wins a prize at an amateur film festival, Filip, encouraged by his success, becomes consumed by his new found passion. But, as he develops his creative skills, Filip soon discovers that his devotion to making films has unexpected consequences as tensions arise in his marriage, his managers impose censorship upon him and his films inadvertently lead to the sacking of a colleague. Featuring a superb performance from Jerzy Stuhr, 'Camera Buff' is a compelling exploration of the power and responsibility of the filmmaker.

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A famous Danish gender activist and owner of Copenhagen's first gender-neutral children's nursery is found dead on a building site in Malmo, her body arranged in a macabre tableaux amongst a 'family' of mannequins.

This marks the beginning of a line of spectacular murders that eventually become personal for Saga. Forced to work with a new Danish partner, who has difficulty accepting her for who she is, and having to deal with her past once more when her mother unexpectedly arrives, Saga is put to the ultimate test both in her work and in her personal life.

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A powerful adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's first novel, 'A Woman's Life' is a timeless story of anguished love set in the repressive world of early 19th century Normandy.

Jeanne (Judith Chemla) is a young woman full of childish dreams and innocence when she returns home after finishing her schooling in a convent. Yet little by little her illusions are stripped away when she marries a local Viscount, Julien de Lamare (Swann Arlaud), who reveals himself to be a miserly and adulterous partner.

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They are both on the run: the man with the dog he is not allowed to own because the law deems it to be unclean, and the young woman who took part in an illicit party on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

They barricade themselves in a secluded villa with curtained windows and eye each other suspiciously. Why has he shaved his head? How does she know he is being followed by the police? They are now prisoners in a house without a view in the midst of a hostile environment The voices of police can be heard in the distance, but so too can the calming sound of the sea. Are we looking at outlaws, or are the man and the young woman merely phantoms, figments of the imagination of a filmmaker who is no longer allowed to work?

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The Color of Paradise is a fable of both a simple child's innocence and a complex look at faith and humanity. Visually magnificent and wrenchingly moving, the film tells of the story of a blind boy, Mohammed, whose inability to see the world only enhances his ability to feel its powerful forces.

From acclaimed director Majid Majidi, The Color Of Paradise continues a strong tradition of Iranian cinema with this very effecting look at a child's definition of the world and his role in it.

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Niloofar (Sahar Dowlatshahi), lives alone in Tehran with her mother, running a clothing workshop. Tehran's air pollution is making it hard to breath.

When doctors insist that her mother must leave smog-laden Tehran or soon die, Niloofars family decide that, as she is single, she must also move North with mother. Niloofar is torn between family loyalty and living her own life, pursuing a potential love interest she has kept secret. She is the youngest and she has always succumbed to family pressure, but this time she decides to stand up for herself.

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Set at the outbreak of War, De Sica's film tells the story of the Finzi Contini, an aristocratic Jewish family protected by the walls of their idyllic estate.

Whilst outside Mussolini bans Jews from tennis courts, the Finzi Contini are not worried as they rally on their own, living in their dreamland. Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) is the middle-class Jew in love with his childhood friend, Micol (Dominique Sanda) of the Finzi Contini family, but she is in love with a gentile and wanting of experiences outlawed by the new government. With Giorgio's separation of Micol, De Sica tracks the loss of an idyllic way of life, from the tennis courts to the waiting rooms where Jews await transportation to the concentration camps.