jill-from-london's - Rented List
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The Small Back Room (1949)Hour of Glory
From the legendary filmmaking duo Powell and Pressburger, 'The Small Back Room' is the story of the troubled love affair between a tormented back room scientist and a beautiful secretary, told against a background of ministerial intrigue and empire building. Sammy Rice (David Farrar) was the army's finest bomb disposal officer until he was injured in the war and left with a false foot. Now part of a specialist 'back room' team, he dismantles the booby-trapped devices being dropped by Nazi bombers. He falls in love with Susan (Kathleen Byron), a colleague, and the two begin a secret affair. However, embittered by life, he feels inferior; inferior as a lover, inferior as a man unable to wear uniform; inferior in his work for, although a brilliant scientist, he allows himself to be exploited by his power-hungry boss. Haunted by his past, he drowns his sorrows in whiskey. Sammy's life is descending into disarray when the news comes; a bomb has exploded with catastrophic consequences, and another has been found. Faced with the biggest challenge of his career, Sammy must confront his demons and take his own life in his hands to solve the mystery of the bomb's lethal mechanism. - Director:
- Michael Powell
- Cast:
- David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Jack Hawkins
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5 Broken Cameras (2011)Five Broken Cameras
Winner of audience prizes at festivals around the world, and long-listed for an Oscar, "5 Broken Cameras" is the story of Bil'in, a West Bank Palestinian village, whose inhabitants have long been mounting a resistance to the occupation and appropriation of their land for neighbouring Israeli settlements. It is told via the footage of local inhabitant Emad Burnat, who bought a camera to make home-movies about the growing years of his new-born son Gibreel, but soon started to document the daily acts of defiance against the provocations by the army, police and settlers. Over the course of several years his cameras are damaged, or even shot, but Emad, and Israeli film-maker Guy Davidi, have together shaped the hundreds of hours filmed into a compelling, stirring and moving document of the collective struggles that daringly meshes the personal essay with political cinema. - Director:
- Emad Burnat
- Cast:
- Soraya Burnat, Mohammed Burnat, Yasin Burnat
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Black Girl / Borom Sarret (1966)La noire de
Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene was the first Sub-Saharan African filmmaker to achieve international recognition, and is widely regarded as the father of African cinema. His first major work. Black Girl, is the uncompromising story of Diouana, a young Senegalese nanny whose hopes of an exciting life in France are dashed when her white employers expect her to work as their servant. Also included is Sembene's directorial debut, the short film Borom Sarret, the first ever indigenous Black African film. An allegorical tale exploring poverty and inequality, it charts a day in the life of a hard-up cart driver in Dakar, whose good deeds are rewarded with great injustice. - Director:
- Ousmane Sembene
- Cast:
- Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Toto Bissainthe, Robert Marcy
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Kings of the Road (1976)Im Lauf der Zeit
The final part of Wim Wenders' loose trilogy of road movies (following on from Alice in the Cities and Wrong Move), Kings Of The Road (aka in the course of time) has been hailed as one of the best films of the 1970s and remains Wenders' most remarkable portrait of his own country. After driving his car at high speed off road and into a river, losing all his worldly possessions, Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler) hitches a ride with Bruno Winter (Rudiger Vogler), who travels across Germany's hinterland repairing projectors in run-down cinemas. Along the way, the two men meet people whose lives are as at odds with the modern world as their own. In attempting to reconcile their past, the two men find themselves increasingly at odds with each other. - Director:
- Wim Wenders
- Cast:
- Rüdiger Vogler, Hanns Zischler, Lisa Kreuzer
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Wings of Desire (1987)Der Himmel über Berlin / The Sky Above Berlin / The Sky Over Berlin
The sky over Wenders' war-scarred Berlin is full of gentle, trenchcoated angels who listen to the tortured thoughts of mortals and try to comfort them. One, Damiel, (Bruno Ganz) wishes to become mortal after falling in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, Marion (Solveig Dommartin). Peter Falk, as himself, assists in the transformation by explaining the simple joys of a human experience. - Director:
- Wim Wenders
- Cast:
- Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander
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An artist and ceramist in Portland, Oregon is on the verge of an important show, but she's plagued with personal problems. Her neighbour-slash-landlady (a fellow or rival artist, as it happens) is failing to fix the hot water in her apartment. Her cat has almost killed a pigeon in their street and she feels obligated to look after the poor injured thing in a cardboard box, instead of working. Her mother (an administrator in the community arts centre where the artist works) is querulously estranged from her dad, who appears to have free loading house guests from Canada. And her bipolar brother, who also has artistic leanings is digging a huge hole in his back garden... - Director:
- Kelly Reichardt
- Cast:
- Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, André Benjamin
- Formats:
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Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is living a happy and quiet life with his lawyer wife (Maria Bello) and their two children in the small town of Millbrook, Indiana, but one night their idyllic existence is shattered when Tom foils a vicious attempted robbery in his diner. Sensing danger, he takes action and saves his customers and friends in the self-defence killings of two-sought-after criminals. Heralded as a hero, Tom's life is changed overnight, attracting a national media circus, which forces him into the spotlight. Uncomfortable with his newfound celebrity, Tom tries to return to the normalcy of his ordinary life only to be confronted by a mysterious and threatening man (Ed Harris) who arrives in town believing Tom is the man who's wronged him in the past. As Tom and his family fight back against this case of mistaken identity and struggle to cope with their changed reality, they are forced to confront their relationships and the divisive issues which surface as a result. - Director:
- David Cronenberg
- Cast:
- Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris
- Formats:
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Tokyo-Ga (1985)Wim Wenders Collection: Tokyo-Ga
"If in our century there are still sacred things, if there were something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu". In 'Tokyo-Ga', Wim Wenders travels to the city of his cinematic hero, Yasujiro Ozu, hoping to still find the spirit of the director in the twenty years since his death. What he discovers is a city consuming itself through material desire. The age of Ozu and the simplicity with which he filmed the world around him has disappeared. In its place is a society driven by constant change. Accepting that the cinematic medium has also changed, Wim Wenders transforms his film into a treatise on the nature of recording everyday life. - Director:
- Wim Wenders
- Cast:
- Chishû Ryû, Werner Herzog, Yuharu Atsuta
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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. - Director:
- Stanley Kubrick
- Cast:
- Michael Hordern, Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson
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And Life Goes On (1994)Zendegi va digar hich
In the aftermath of a 1990 earthquake that left at least thirty thousand dead, Abbas Kiarostami returned to Koker, where his camera surveys not only devastation but also the teeming life in its wake. Blending fiction and reality into a playful, poignant road movie, 'And Life Goes On' follows a film director who, along with his son, makes the trek to the region in hopes of finding out if the young star of 'Where is the Friend's House?' is among the survivors, and discovers a resilient community pressing on in the face of tragedy. Finding beauty in the bleakest of circumstances, Kiarostami crafts a quietly majestic ode to the best of the human spirit. - Director:
- Abbas Kiarostami
- Cast:
- Farhad Kheradmand, Buba Bayour, Hocine Rifahi
- Formats:
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Diary for My Children (1982)Napló gyermekeimnek
From one of the world's foremost women directors, this deeply personal work portrays the impact of individuals upon history and of historical forces upon individual lives. Neither purely fictional nor entirely autobiographical, the film is a reflection on Meszaros' own experiences channelled via Juli, a young woman returning home to Budapest from the Soviet Union where her parents were exiled and had died. Scarred by the wounds of the past, she is repulsed to see the very same spectre of Stalinist oppression now rife in her homeland. Meszaros' film resonates with the spirit and the struggles of her past - a passionate yet critical study of personal and political awakening told in ruthlessly unsentimental fashion. - Director:
- Márta Mészáros
- Cast:
- Zsuzsa Czinkóczi, Teri Földi, Sándor Oszter
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Memories of a childhood shaped by the sectarianism come to the fore as Maeve (Mary Jackson) returns to a Belfast still steeped in the politics of the Troubles. Presenting a feminist alternative to the conventional narrative of the conflict, filmmakers Pat Murphy and John Davies broke new ground with their experimental approach, which challenges many of the formal qualities of mainstream cinema. 'Maeve' is a powerful take on the issues of feminism and nationalism, a film rich in debate and disruption and an overlooked gem of 1980's independent film that's ripe for rediscovery. - Director:
- Pat Murphy
- Cast:
- Mary Jackson, Mark Mulholland, Brid Brennan
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Where is the Friend's Home? (1987)Khane-ye doust kodjast?
An 8 year old boy must return his friend's notebook he took by mistake, lest his friend be punished by expulsion from school.- Director:
- Abbas Kiarostami
- Cast:
- Babek Ahmed Poor, Ahmed Ahmed Poor, Khodabakhsh Defaei
- Formats:
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3 Faces (2018)Three Faces / Se rokh
In Jafar Panahi's latest film, which won the Best Screenplay Award in Cannes, actress Behnaz Jafari is distraught when she comes across a young girl's video plea for help after her family prevents her from taking up her studies at the Tehran drama conservatory. Behnaz abandons her shoot and turns to the filmmaker Jafar Panahi to help her with the young girl's troubles. They travel by car to the rural, Azeri-speaking Northwest of Iran, where they encounter the charming and generous folk of the girl's mountain village. But Behnaz and Jafar also discover that old traditions die hard. - Director:
- Jafar Panahi
- Cast:
- Behnaz Jafari, Jafar Panahi, Marziyeh Rezaei
- Formats:
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Fasten your ergonomic seat belt, you're in for a hilarious ride through the inner workings of Office Space, the outrageous hit comedy that will strike fear into the little hearts of bosses everywhere! Unable to endure another mind-numbing day at Initech Corporation, cubicle slave Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) gets fired up and decides to get fired. Armed with a leisurely new attitude and a sexy new girlfriend (Jennifer Aniston), he soon masters the art of neglecting his job, which quickly propels him into the ranks of upper management! - Director:
- Mike Judge
- Cast:
- Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, David Herman
- Formats:
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