jwc's - Rented List
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A plainclothes street patrolman, Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) might be the best cop in New York, but he's unwilling to play dirty and give into the police corruption surrounding drugs, violence, and kickbacks that his colleagues indulge in every day. When he decides to expose those around him, Frank finds himself a target - not just to the city's criminals, but to his own peers. - Director:
- Sidney Lumet
- Cast:
- Al Pacino, John Randolph, Jack Kehoe
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Downfall (2004)Der Untergang
Set in Berlin, 1945, this powerful and provocative war drama retells the final days of the Second World War as recorded in the diaries of Adolf Hitler's private secretary, Traudl Junge, while barricaded with Hitler and his closest confidants in the Fuhrer's secret bunker. Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel with an astonishing performance by Bruno Ganz as history's most notorious figure, this unprecedented and controversial insider's perspective is a gripping insight into the madness and desperation of Hitler in the final hours of the war as the Russian Army closes a ring around Berlin. - Director:
- Oliver Hirschbiegel
- Cast:
- Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Ulrich Matthes
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Spies, cops, and armed children cross paths on a day of danger, mystery and possible transformation. Bound unfolds over twenty minutes on one New Orleans afternoon, experienced through the lives of five unusual characters who unknowingly are connected to an extraordinary smuggling operation as religious conspiracy collides with urban crime. - Director:
- Leone Marucci
- Cast:
- Christopher Walken, Kelly Wagner, Juvenile
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What connects us? Is it our relationships? Proximity? Love, hate, confusion? What draws us together or keeps us apart? In this groundbreaking work, director Robert Altman poses answers to these questions by intricately intertwining the stories of legendary writer Raymond Carver. 'Short Cuts' burst onto the scene in 1993 and set the stage for an entirely new way of thinking about storytelling that has been fully comprehended and embraced by modern filmmakers in recent years. Winning a special award for its ensemble cast at the 1994 Golden Globes, Short Cuts features a seemingly endless dream cast. Never before and not since its release has a single film captured the range of human emotions and interactions like Short Cuts has. You're invited to experience the countless moments that make up these characters' lives at a time and in a place where death is never far away and life is on the tip of everybody's tongue. - Director:
- Robert Altman
- Cast:
- Andie MacDowell, Julianne Moore, Tim Robbins
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When Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright) - lovelorn after the loss of her beloved sweetheart Westley (Cary Elwes) - is kidnapped by cunning crook Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) and his sidekicks Fezzik the Giant (André the Giant) and swordsman Inigo (Mandy Patinkin), she is confident her one true love will come to save her. But is the man in the mask hot on the heels of her captors the Prince Humperdink (Chris Sarandon), to whom she is now betrothed, or a mysterious stranger. This family fairy-tale will touch your heart, tickle your funny bone and leave you feeling happily ever after. - Director:
- Rob Reiner
- Cast:
- Cary Elwes, Willy DeVille, Mandy Patinkin
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My Life as a Dog (1985)Mitt liv som hund
The year is 1959. A young boy, Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius), is obsessed by two things - his namesake fighting for the World Heavyweight boxing title and the fate of Laika, the dog sent in to space by Russia. As his mother's health deteriorates and she no longer has the strength to cope with him, Ingemar is sent to stay with relatives in the country, much like Laika's journey into the unknown. - Director:
- Lasse Hallström
- Cast:
- Anton Glanzelius, Olle Björklund, Folke Olhagen
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Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) and his wife, Etheline (Angelica Huston), had three children - Chas, Margot, and Richie - and then they separated. Chas (Ben Stiller) started buying real estate in his early teens and seemed to have an almost preternatural understanding of international finance. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) was a playwright and received a Braverman Grant of $50,000 in the ninth grade. Richie (Luke Wilson) was a junior champion tennis player and won the U.S. Nationals three years in a row. Virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums was subsequently erased by two decades of betrayal., failure, and disaster. - Director:
- Wes Anderson
- Cast:
- Gene Hackman, Wes Anderson, Gwyneth Paltrow
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Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) is an idealistic filmmaker…until he is offered a lucrative job shooting a flattering profile of a pompous TV producer (Alan Alda). Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is the pillar of his community…until he learns that his ex-mistress (Anjelica Huston) plans to expose his financial and extramarital misdeeds. As Cliff chooses between integrity and selling out, and Judah decides between the counsel of his Rabbi (Sam Waterson) and the murderous advice of his mobster brother (Jerry Orbach), each man must examine his own morality, and make an irrevocable decision - that will change everyone's lives forever. - Director:
- Woody Allen
- Cast:
- Martin Landau, Woody Allen, Bill Bernstein
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Orson Welles makes his feature-length directorial debut with this classic drama which often tops critics' polls of the best films of all time. In 1940, newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane (Welles) dies after uttering the word 'Rosebud'. An anonymous reporter (William Alland) is assigned the task of uncovering the meaning of Kane's dying word, and in the course of his enquiries he receives varying accounts of his life from former colleagues Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten) and Bernstein (Everett Sloan), and ex-wife Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore). The film, which Welles also produced and co-wrote, was not-so-loosely based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. - Director:
- Orson Welles
- Cast:
- Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore
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Who is the man who hides his scarred face behind a mask? Hero or madman? Liberator or oppressor? Who is V - and who will join him in his daring plot to destroy the totalitarian regime that dominated his nation? Natalie Portman stars as Evey, a working-class girl who must determine if her hero has become the very menace she's fighting against. Hugo Waving plays V - a bold, charismatic freedom fighter driven to exact revenge on those who disfigured him. And Stephen Rea portrays the detective leading a desperate quest to capture V before he ignites a revolution. The Stakes rise. The tension electrifies. The action explodes. - Director:
- James McTeigue
- Cast:
- Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman, Rupert Graves
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The Little Tramp punches in and wigs out inside a factory where gizmos like an employee feeding machine may someday make the lunch hour last just 15 minutes. Bounced into the ranks of the unemployed, he teams with a street waif (Paulette Goddard) to pursue bliss and a paycheck, finding misadventures as a roller-skating night watchman, a singing waiter whose hilarious song is gibberish, a jailbird and more. In the end, as tramp and waif walk arm in arm into an insecure future we know they've found neither bliss nor a paycheck but, more importantly, each other. The times and satire remain timeless in 'Modern Times'. - Director:
- Charles Chaplin
- Cast:
- Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman
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An alien entity inhabits the earthly form of a seductive young woman who combs the Scottish highways in search of the human prey it is here to plunder. It lures its isolated and forsaken male victims into an otherworldly dimension where they are stripped and consumed. But life in all its complexity starts to change the alien. It begins to see itself as 'she', as human, with tragic and terrifying consequence. 'Under the Skin' is about seeing ourselves through alien eyes. - Director:
- Jonathan Glazer
- Cast:
- Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams, Lynsey Taylor Mackay
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In the 1920s, political activist Jimmy Gralton built a dance hall in rural Ireland. As the hall grew in popularity its free-spirited reputation brought it to the attention of the church and politicians who forced Jimmy to flee and the hall to close. A decade later, at the height of the Depression, Jimmy returns from the US. The hall stands abandoned but as Jimmy sees the poverty and growing oppression in the village, the leader and activist within him is stirred. He decides to reopen the hall, and so takes on the established authorities of the church and the government. - Director:
- Ken Loach
- Cast:
- Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Andrew Scott
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Force Majeure (2014)Turist
The sun is beaming and the ski slopes are spectacular for Tomas, his wife Ebba and their two children. However, during a lunch at a mountainside restaurant an avalanche suddenly bears down upon the happy diners. As the wall of snow gets ever closer, Tomas makes a split-second decision in a moment of panic that will engulf and shake his relationship with his wife and children and leave him struggling to reclaim his role as the family patriarch. - Director:
- Ruben Östlund
- Cast:
- Johannes Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Clara Wettergren
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Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963)Ieri, oggi, domani
Adelina (Sophia Loren) sells black-market cigarettes on the streets of Naples to support her unemployed husband Carmine (Marcello Mastroianni). Caught by the police, and with a jail sentence hanging over her head, desperation sets in. She learns that she can avoid prison as long as she's pregnant. Several years and seven children later, Carmine is exhausted, so jail looks inescapable as does Adelina's contempt for Carmine. In Milan, our second protagonist, Anna (Loren), is bored and wealthy, drives a Rolls Royce, and is having an affair with a writer (Mastroianni). She talks dreamily of running off with him, that is until one day he crashes her car... In the third and final vignette, Loren plays Mara, a call girl from Rome, who turns the head of a naive young man training to become a Priest, prompting a run-in with his self-righteous grandmother and a vow of abstinence. Features Loren's notorious striptease, which was recreated years later by Robert Altman in Prêt-à-Porter. - Director:
- Vittorio De Sica
- Cast:
- Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Aldo Giuffrè
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