monsieurk's - Rented List

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Adapted from Nobel Laureate Wladyslaw Reymont's classic 1897 novel, 'The Promised Land' is the story of three friends - one Polish, one German and one Jewish - united in their ruthless pursuit of fortune.

With stunning camerawork and sumptuous design, Wadja depicts the explosive energy of a world being transformed by rampant industrialisation. Often cited as the greatest Polish film ever, this visceral examination of unbridled capitalism remains morally and politically incisive today. Nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar and presented here in its original uncut cinema version, Wajda's lavish epic is a Dickensian tale of greed, human cruelty and betrayal.

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In one of Walerian Borowczyk's most celebrated features, a 13th-century French nobleman's beautiful wife Blanche, as innocent as her name, becomes the unwilling object of attention by various visitors, including the King and his philandering page.

Widely acclaimed as one of the cinema's most original and convincing evocations of the Middle Ages, Blanche's unique visual style resembles a medieval fresco, and its period-instruments soundtrack was years ahead of its time.

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Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler) - young, attractive, bright, sensitive - falls in love at a carnival party with a young radical lawbreaker in flight from the police.

Her brief association with a hunted man brings her under police surveillance and makes her the cruelly exploited subject of cheap newspaper sensationalism. Paraded across the front pages of a big-city daily newspaper, portrayed as a whore, an atheist, a Communist sympathizer, she becomes the target of anonymous phone-calls and letters, sexual advances integrity so profound that it overcomes even her will to survive, she shoots the offending journalist.

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1920's outback Australia, Northern Territory. When Sam (Hamilton Morris), an Aboriginal farmhand who works for the local preacher (Sam Neill) is sent to help new neighbour and bitter war veteran Harry (Ewen Leslie), their relationship quickly deteriorates, ending in a violent and fatal shootout.

Sam is forced to flee with his wife, pursued by lawman Sergeant Fletcher (Bryan Brown), but as the truth starts to surface, the community begins to question whether justice is really being served.

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Yasujiro Ozu's hugely influential award-winning masterpiece, 'Late Spring', is a tender meditation on family politics, sacrifice and the status quo.

Noriko (Setsuko Hara) and her father, Professor Somiya (Chishu Ryu), live together in perfect harmony but old certainties are put at risk when an interfering aunt raises the question of marriage. Introducing Ozu's popular Noriko character, 'Late Spring' poignantly examines the gradual compromise between modernity and tradition.

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Renowned poet Juan (Carlos Reygadas) runs a cattle ranch with his wife Esther (Natalia Lopez) in rural Mexico. While he tends to the horses and the bulls, Esther manages the ranch and looks after their three children.

Despite previously suggesting the idea of an open marriage, Juan is devastated when he discovers his wife has been having a passionate affair with horse trainer Phil (Phil Burgers).

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It's the engagement party for brilliant young Dr Henry Jekyll (Udo Kier) and his fiancee, the beautiful Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro), attended by various pillars of Victorian society, including the astonishing Patrick Magee in one of his final roles.

But when people are found raped and murdered outside and ultimately inside the house, it becomes clear that a madman has broken in to disrupt the festivities - but who is he? And why does Dr Jekyll keep sneaking off to his laboratory? We know the answer, of course, but Walerian Borowczyk's visually stunning adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's much-filmed tale is crammed with wildly imaginative and outrageously perverse touches characteristic of the man who scandalised audiences with Immoral Tales and The Beast, not least the explicitly sexualised nature of Mr Hyde's primal urges.

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A group of German construction workers start a tough job at a remote site in the Bulgarian countryside.

The foreign land awakens the men's sense of adventure, but they are also confronted with their own prejudices and mistrust due to the language barrier and cultural differences with the native villagers. The foreman Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek) and the mysterious Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann) also start to fall out. The stage is quickly set for a showdown when the German workers begin to compete for recognition and favour from the local villagers.

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A middle-class schoolteacher, stuck in a government-enforced teaching post in an arid backwater, stops off in the mining town of Bundanyabba on his way home for the Christmas holidays.

Discovering a local gambling craze that may grant him the financial independence to move back to Sydney for good, the opportunity proves irresistible. But the bad decisions are just beginning and a reliance on local standards of hospitality in "the Yabba" may take him on a path darker than ever expected.

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In the stark beauty of 19th Century Snowdonia a young girl Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), tries desperately to hold her home together.

Struggling with her mother's mysterious illness, her father's absence and a ruthless mining company encroaching on their land, a growing darkness begins to take grip of her home, and the suspicious local community turns on Gwen and her family.

Twenty years after discovering gold in the Canadian wilderness, Jack McCann (Gene Hackman) is a reclusive multi-millionaire living on his own Caribbean island with his alcoholic wife and troubled daughter. But his paradise haven is threatened by mobsters who want to build a casino on his land.

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Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a young film student struggling to find a firm direction in life when she meets the seemingly unwavering and decisive Anthony (Tom Burke). The two immediately take to one another and an intense romance blossoms between them.

However, as the relationship develops it becomes clear that Anthony is not being honest about all aspects of himself and Julie slowly discovers that the)' could have potentially devastating consequences for them both. One of Britain's most unique filmmakers Joanna Hogg (Archipelago, Unrelated) presents a deeply personal examination of her own youthful experiences in this beautifully crafted, Martin Scorsese produced portrait of self discovery, 'The Souvenir'.

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Miklos Jancso is one of cinema's greatest visionaries and his Red Psalm is a formidable work of art from a master filmmaker at the peak of his powers. Depicting a series of peasant uprisings in Hungary in the late 19th century, the film celebrates the cause of revolutionary struggle.

Inspired by folklore and song, Jancso's camera travels amongst groups of moving figures in an elaborate cinematic ballet and his singular use of film form achieves a resonance and beauty that is extraordinary. Radical in execution and poetic in its achievement, Red Psalm reaches beyond political dogma to expose a more universal, and deeper, truth that remains relevant today.

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The second film in the trilogy of celebrated collaborations between director Istvan Szabo and actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, Colonel Redl continues the examination of ambition, political intrigue, betrayal and destruction.

Set during the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film tells of the rise and fall of Alfred Redl (Brandauer), an ambitious young officer who proceeds up the ladder to become head of the Secret Police only to become ensnared in political deception.

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"Fanny and Alexander" is Bergman's dreamlike family chronicle. The Ekdahl's are an upper-middle-class theatrical family sheltered by their own theatrics from the deepening chaos of the outside world.

One tumultuous year in the life of the Ekdahl family is viewed through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), whose imagination fuels the magical goings-on leading up to and following the death of his father. His mother's remarriage to a stern prelate banishes Alexander and his sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) from all known joys, and thrusts them and the movie into a kind of gothic horror. The bishop is a Bergmanesque character whose severity has gone awry - he has become sinister - and the film's round rejection of him in favour of "kindness, affection and goodness" may be Bergman's fondest farewell to cinema.