jcs's - Rented List

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Made under the Franco regime, Victor Erice's astonishing 1973 feature debut is quite simply one of the most remarkable, influential and purely poignant films to emerge from the 1970's. A bona-fide classic of European cinema, the film brought Erice instant and widespread acclaim.

An audacious critique of the disastrous legacy of the Spanish Civil War, The Spirit of the Beehive is set in a rural 1940's Spanish village haunted by betrayal and regret. Following a travelling cinema's screening of James Whale's Frankenstein, seven year-old Ana (the mesmerising Ana Torrent, later to grow into an international star of some standing) becomes fascinated with Boris Karloff's monster. Obsessed with meeting the initially gentle creation, she transfers her entrancement to tending a wounded army deserter. Atmospherically rendered by legendary Director of Photography Luis Cuadrado, it's impeccably performed by both Torrent and veteran actor Fernando Fernan Gomez in the role of her emotionally scarred, bee-keeping father. Existing in a highly evocative dreamlike state, it's a powerfully symbolic, richly allegorical tale that is as unique as it is beautiful.

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Based on the true story of Resistance fighter Andre Devigny, who was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Nazis during the Second World War, the film reconstructs his actual cell at the Lyons fortress of Montluc, and follows his meticulous plans for escape.

This totally involving and thrilling tale of courage and faith is all the more authentic for its use of non-professional actors and Bresson's spare style.

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Roger Livesey brilliantly portrays a British officer, Clive Candy, through the trials and tribulations of three wars, three lovers and a lifelong friendship across enemy lines. During the Boer War, candy is sent to Berlin to trap a German spy.

There he befriends a German officer, Theo (Anton Walbrook), who marries the girl (Deborah Kerr) Candy is in love with. During the First World War, Candy marries a girl who resembles his lost love and helps Theo - now a POW - to get repatriated. Candy comes back in the Second World War as Brigadier General and once again encounters Theo. On joining a Home Guard exercise, Candy is captured, however, and the two are forced to either aid or betray each other.

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'Gertrud' is the story of a woman's search for a romantic ideal of total and perfect love. A once famous singer now in her early forties, Gertrud makes the decision to leave her lawyer husband for her lover, a young composer.

Discovering the next day that her lover has betrayed her, and is unable to give her his total love, Gertrud rejects both husband and lover, choosing a life of solitude and study over the compromise of love that is merely half-measure.

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In 16th century Japan a poor village is raided every year by a group of bandits until, driven to the brink of starvation, the villagers decide to hire professional warriors to protect them. With only three meager meals a day to offer as payment, their request seems an impossible one.

A simple plot, flawlessly executed - 'Seven Samurai' combines comedy, pathos, memorable characters, gripping tension and some of the finest action scenes ever filmed.

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Having left behind his life as a gifted concert pianist, Charlie (Charles Aznavour) sees out his downcast days tinkling the ivories in a dingy Parisian jazz bar. One day his brother Chico (Albert Rémy) arrives, searching for sanctuary from a gang of crooks that he's double-crossed.

Charlie offers to help but soon finds his murky past catching up with him and before long is embroiled in an affair that he can no longer control.

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How does an Irish lad without prospects become part of 18th-century nobility? For Barry Lyndon (Ryan O'Neal) the answer is: any way he can! His climb to wealth and privilege is the enthralling focus of this sumptuous Stanley Kubrick version of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel.

For this ravishing, slyly satiric winner of four Academy Awards, Kubrick found inspiration in the works of the era's painters. Costumes and sets were crafted in the era's designs and pioneering lenses were developed to shoot interiors and exteriors in natural light. The result? Barry Lyndon endures as a cutting-edge movie that brings a historical period to vivid screen life like no other film before or since.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's masterpiece stars Anna Magnani as the fiery Mamma Roma, prostitute who attempts to better her life for the sake of her son, Ettore. But her efforts may be too late: Ettore is drawn to life on the street, and falls, ironically, for a younger prostitute.

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Year Zero in a divided Germany. With his father too ill to work, his soldier brother terrified of being arrested as a war criminal and his sister reduced to cadging cigarettes off occupying troops, 12 year-old Edmund scours Berlin for any work he can find.

However, a meeting with his disgraced teacher, who still clings to his Nazi ideals, suggests a hideous solution to his problems.

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After his inevitable arrest (and almost immediate release), Michel (Martin LaSalle) reflects on the morality of crime, developing a vague theory that exceptional individuals are above the law.

Lost in another world, he rejects his friends in favour of a life of crime and is seemingly set on finding his place in the world by engineering a head-on collision with society.

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A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, Robert Bresson's 'Au Hasard Balthazar' follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding.

Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly. Through Bresson's unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this simple story becomes a moving parable about purity and transcendence.