matti's - Rented List

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Fassbinder's first international success observes middle-class conformity and alienation with a finely judged balance of empathy and dark satire. Mild-mannered Herr R. works in an architectural practice and lives with his wife and son.

His time is spent ambling through the monotony of his daily routine and indulging in meaningless small talk. But one shocking evening, Herr R. finds he can take no more.

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Federlco Fellini's epic 1980 fantasia introduced the start of the Maestro's delirious late period.

A surrealist tour-de-force filmed on soundstages and locations alike, and overflowing with the same sensory (and sensual) invention heretofore found only in the classic movie-musicals (and Fellini's own oeuvre), La citta delle donne (City of Women) taps into the era's restless youth-culture, coalescing into nothing less than Fellini's post-punk opus. Marcello Mastroianni appears as Fellini's alter ego in a semi-reprise of his character from 8 1/2, Snaporaz. As though passing into a dream, the charismatic avatar finds himself initiated into a phantasmagoric world where women - or an idea of women - have taken power, and which is structured like an array of psychosexual set-pieces - culminating in a bravura hot-air balloon that decisively sticks the "anti" up into "climax". A great adventure "through the looking-glass", as it were, of Fellini's own phallic lens and life-long libidinal ruminations, La citta delle donne sharply divided critics at the 1980 Festival de Cannes, some of whom had merely anticipated a nostalgic retread of the earlier Mastroianni works. What they were greeted with, and what remains today, is, in the words of Serge Daney, "a victory of cinema".

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Widely regarded as one of Alan Resnais' finest films, Stavisky attempts to shed some light on the eponymous, enigmatic and yet comparatively unknown Russian emigre who scandalised France.

Stavisky (Jean-Paul Belmondo) built an empire through a combination of subterfuge, fraud and false identity, becoming, as the more respectably titled Serge Alexandre, one of the most influential and powerful men in France in the period between the wars. As the investigations of Inspector Bonny (Claude Rich) reveal, Stavisky's life was the perfect sham, which took in businessmen, financiers and politicians of all persuasions. Eschewing a straight historical biopic, Resnais and writer Jorge Semprun (Z) restrict the scope of the film to the last few months of Stavisky's eventful life, covering his spectacular fall from grace. A work of rare technical brilliance in which the period detail is impeccable, Stavisky'S score is courtesy of Stephen Sondheim.

The chocolate business has been good to Russian exile Hermann. He enjoys the good life with his beautiful wife Lydia. But Hermann is addicted to out-of-body experiences and when he meets a tramp on a business trip, he hatches an insane escape plan.

World War II separated pianist Christine Radcliffe from her great love, cellist Karel Novak. Unexpectedly reunited with Karel, Christine desperately strives to hide her wartime dalliance as the mistress of a wealthy, sadistic composer. She'll lie to keep her shameful past a secret. But will she also murder?

This is the story of a beautiful art dealer, Lacy Anderson (Catherine Oxenberg) who travels to an isolated logging town in search of a mysterious painter, and there she becomes entrapped in a web of deceit, terror and murder.

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Unable to live with her mother, Berit is institutionalised for many years. When she is released from the institutions she ends up on the streets of the harbour slums of Gothenburg, and is forced to take a job.

The job is conditional on her living with her mother and she becomes a young woman in deep suicidal despair. One night she escapes her mother's overbearing apartment to go to a dance and, in an effort to lighten her spirits, she meets a sailor and tells her new-found confidante of her troubled past. She starts to spend more time with him and begins to meet others, soon, she discovers that she is not the only one with problems.

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Two icons from the golden age of Hollywood, Oscar winners Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, take their famous feud onscreen in Robert Aldrich's newly restored thriller.

In fierce, no-holds-barred performances, Bette Davis portrays aging ex-child star Baby Jane Hudson while Joan Crawford plays Blanche, the crippled sister Jane torments psychologically. As the sisters descend into madness, the tension builds to a shocking ending...

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Six young friends fly off on a weekend's camping trip when engine trouble forces them down on a remote American Island. They explore and find a strange house occupied by an even stranger family.

MA (Yvonne De Carlo), PA (Rod Steiger) and their three middle-aged children, still living in the past of 1920 backwoods America. To their relief the group of friends are given shelter and welcomed with apple pie and bible reading. This remote idyll rapidly becomes the stuff of nightmares as one by one the young friends die macabre and horrible deaths. Eventually only CYNTHIA (Sarah Torgov) is left alive, and the secret of the Island is revealed. But Cynthia too has a past, and the horrors she experiences on the Island are enough to snap her already fragile hold on reality. She renders a terrible revenge on the killing family and finds herself the sole survivor of the Island of death. Now she waits for the next innocent visitor.

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Six years after exploding to stardom in Of Human Bondage, Bette Davis equaled that excitement with another W. Somerset Maugham role as an adulteress using her sexual wiles to escape a murder conviction in The Letter.

The film throbs with sultry tension thanks to Davis, an impeccable supporting cast, atmospheric cinematography and the artistry of three-time Academy Award winner* William Wyler, Davis' director on Jezebel and The Little Foxes.

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Jean (Jean Yanne) and Catherine (Marlene Jobert) are a couple whose every move charts an advancement deeper into an emotional warzone. Theirs is the classic and the tragic case of an emotional abuse centred around a perplexing, but powerful, interdependency.

As the moment approaches wherein the relationship can no longer perpetuate its cycle of weekend holidays, apologies, and submissions, Maurice Pialat discloses all the ways in which the future might be at once liberated, and enslaved, by the past. Based on a novel by Pialat himself, and on the trauma of his own personal life in the years leading up to the film. Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble was a smash-hit at the time of its release, and retains its power up to the present day.

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Beginning with the collapse of an apartment building in a working-class district, the film zeroes in on the subsequent investigation of responsibility surrounding the disaster.

At the centre is Edoardo Nottola (Rod Steiger), a wealthy land developer and council member of the government's ruling party, who is determined to keep his personal and professional interests in the building of new government housing as intertwined as possible.

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In an effort to shore up a shaky truce between civilians and base personnel three hapless Army buddies find themselves appointed community public relations officers.

Unfortunately Sergeant Shannon Gambroni's (Tony Curtis) idea of community relations includes pursuing and wooing Ramona (Suzanne Pleshette) a sexy waitress whom Sheriff Harve (Ernest Borgnine) considers his personal property. When ammo and amour finally clash in an outrageous battle royal who will ultimately surrender?

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During the chaos of a large wedding replete with drunken relatives, two cousins by marriage meet for the first time. Marthe has an adulterer for a husband, while Ludovic is burdened with a hyperactive, over-sensitive wife, and both are dissatisfied with life.

Deciding that they should see more of each other, they find that they greatly enjoy each other's company. However, when their spouses begin to think that more than a friendship is blooming, the idea starts to become appealing to them!

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Filmed on the virtually deserved Setonaikai archipelago in south-west Japan. The Naked Island tells the story of a small family unit and their subsistence as the only inhabitants of an arid, sun-baked island.

Daily chores, captured as a series of cyclical events, result in a hypnotizing, moving, and beautiful film harkening back to the silent era.