monsieurk's - Rented List

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The mostly black-and-white film begins with a present-day color sequence, then reverts to monochrome and the freezing winter of 1935, when the narrator was nine years old.

The boy lived in an apartment with his father and two other men, Police Chief Ivan Lapshin (Andrei Boltnev) and his officious underling (Alexei Zharkov). The story focuses on Lapshin as he tracks down a gang of crooks in his provincial Russian village, helps his recently widowed friend, and enters into a tentative relationship with an actress (Nina Ruslanova).

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A Japanese box-office sensation in 1968, Kuroneko is a sparse, atmospheric horror story, adhering to Kaneto Shindo's philosophy of using beauty and purity to evoke emotion.

Eccentric and more overtly supernatural than its breakthrough companion piece, Onibaba (1964), Kuroneko revisits similar themes to reveal a haunting meditation on duty, conformity and love. In this magnificently eerie and romantic film - loosely based on the Japanese folktale The Cat's Return - a mother and daughter-in-law (Nobuko Otowa and Kiwako Taichi) are raped and murdered by pillagers, but return from the dead as vampiric cat spirits intent on revenge. As the ghosts lure soldiers into the bamboo groves, a fearless samurai, Gintoki (Kichiemon Nakamura), is sent to stop their reign of terror.

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This wildly melodramatic tale of a kabuki female impersonator who exacts a long-delayed revenge on the men who drove his parents to suicide is played out against a backdrop of comic rivalries between thieves in the Tokyo underworld.

Kazuo Hasegawa plays the dual role of the actor and the thief in a film which celebrates his 300th screen appearance. A heady mixture of swooning romanticism and stylised action, with a soundtrack that ranges from traditional Japanese music to lush Hollywood strings and cocktail jazz, 'An Actor's Revenge' is a cinematic tour de force.

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Ernest Hemingway s spare, laconic short story about two professional killers and their encounter with a mysteriously unresisting victim was significantly expanded into this all-time film noir classic, which Hemingway said was the first adaptation of his work that he really admired.

As washed-up boxer turned hitman victim Ole 'Swede' Andreson, Burt Lancaster made his screen debut, and was catapulted to instant stardom, not least for the screen chemistry that he showed opposite sultry Ava Gardner, whose Kitty Collins is the very personification of the femme fatale. German émigré Robert Siodmak was one of the filmmakers who helped create film noir, and Elwood Bredell s high-contrast cinematography, all harsh lighting and long shadows, elevates the film far above a conventional crime drama. But even on that level it s a first-rate demonstration of how to maintain narrative tension, with the flashback structure withholding crucial details until almost the very end.

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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.

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The latest from award-winning filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi (Fire at Sea), 'Notturno' is a sweeping depiction of three turbulent years in the heart of Middle Eastern war zones, observing the devastating toll being taken on civilian populations who have no choice but to live on the frontlines.

As intimate as it is profoundly moving, Rosi's latest is a breathtaking cinematic achievement from a master of the documentary form.

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When two rival bounty hunters (Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef) learn they're both after the same murderous bandit, they join forces in hopes of bringing him to justice.

But all is not as it seems in the hard-hitting second installment of Sergio Leone's trilogy starring Eastwood as the famed "Man with No Name".

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Unambitious yacht salesman and gigolo Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) skates on his good looks and avoids all responsibility.

His best friend Alex Cutter (John Heard) returned from Vietnam with his body ruined, but his mind sharpened and attuned to the injustices and politics that led to his predicament. After Bone witnesses a shadowy figure dump a young woman's body in the trash, he fingers local oil magnate J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliotth) as the killer. As Bone backs away from this accusation, Cutter charges forward on a crusade to make Cord pay not only for this murder, but for all the other crimes fat cats like him have routinely gotten away with. Cutter's long-suffering wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), struggles to keep her own head above the surface, while steering the two men toward saner waters.

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Based on the infamous Johnson County War of 1892, Michael Cimino's epic western is now hailed as a masterpiece of American cinema...Harvard graduate James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) has returned to Wyoming as a Marshall and is facing a county with growing divisions and escalating tensions.

The powerful, government-backed cattle barons are waging war on the immigrant settlers they brand 'thieves and anarchists' and are drawing up a 'death list' for their hired mercenaries to act upon. As hostilities mount, the inevitability of a full-scale and bloody war edges ever closer.

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Probably the ultimate slow-burn film, 'Aurora' is the follow-up to 'The Death of Mr Lazarescu', and starts by showing the apparently banal life of an engineer, played by the director Cristi Puiu himself. But the day's incidents are overlain with a growing unease and anxiety.

When he buys a shotgun, the slow tension gradually builds.

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Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! Is a story of a new breed of superwomen… three buxom go-go girls: Varla, Rosie and Billie, wildly dancing the watusi before the leers, jeers and lecherous come-ons on their drooling all-male audience.

The violence, implicit in the girls' tease, is quickly moved out of the microcosmic bar into outside world as they literally let go of themselves, embarking on a wild, violent, deadly journey of vengeance on all men. Varla, the outrageously abundant karate master leader of the pack, breaks the arms and back of one man, runs her Porsche over two others, grinds a fourth, a muscleman, against a wall and, eventually, deliberately goes down the path of her own self-destruction, dragging her two buxotic cohorts along with her.

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Fresh from the bloody battlefields of Vietnam, Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte) does his friend Converse a favour, smuggling a stash of heroin back to the States.

But when Ray goes to deliver the drugs, he and Converse's wife, Marge (Tuesday Weld), are ambushed and barely escape with their lives! Suddenly on the run from two ruthless thugs and a murderous cop, the unlikely pair must find a way to get along and survive a perilous double-cross in this nightmare adventure that quickly becomes a harrowing journey into hell.

Macario falls for the blonde waving her fan in the window opposite, gains and loses fortunes in her pursuit, but too late discovers something disturbing about her character.

A reclusive truffle hunter (Nicolas Cage) who lives alone in the wilderness must return to his past in Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped.

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John Gavin plays Ernst Graber, a soldier on the Russian-German Front in 1944 venturing home to Hamburg on a rare furlough.

He falls in love with Elisabeth (Liselotte Pulver) activating a magnetism that compels both individuals toward one another in love, even as it hurtles them headlong into epochal death.