monsieurk's - Rented List

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Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his daughter Hana (Ryô Nishikawa) live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. Like generations before them, they live a modest life according to the cycles and order of nature.

One day, the village inhabitants become aware of a plan to build a glamping site near Takumi's house; offering city residents a comfortable 'escape' to nature. When two company representatives from Tokyo arrive in the village to hold a meeting, it becomes clear that the project will have a negative impact on the local water supply, causing unrest. The agency's mismatched intentions endanger both the ecological balance of the nature plateau and their way of life, with an aftermath that affects Takumi's life deeply.

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A young girl named Teresa Banks is found brutally murdered. The FBI agents leading the investigation are drawn into a bizarre and dangerous world, and then disappear. The case is handed to Agent Dale Cooper. He knows it is only a matter of time before the killer strikes again.

Welcome to Twin Peaks, an idyllic part of small-town America, one year later. A picture postcard setting, but hiding beneath the surface of this tranquil town lies an evil force. One that is praying on the towns most popular and beautiful student. Her name is Laura Palmer.

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Born in Brussels in 1950 to parents who had survived the Holocaust, Chantal Akerman directed more than 40 films (short, medium and feature-length) over almost 50 years, spanning fiction, documentary, musical comedy and literary adaptation.

Today, she is regarded as one of the most important and influential directors of her generation. Akerman's personal, non-conformist body of work has resonated with cinephiles globally and become increasingly relevant since her death in 2015, with filmmakers including Joanna Hogg (The Eternal Daughter), Celine Sciamma (Petite Maman), Alice Diop (Saint Omer) and Jacques Audiard (Emilia Perez), among others, citing her radical and experimental approach to cinema as a direct inspiration. Although best known for her landmark second narrative feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which topped the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time Poll in 2022 (becoming the first female-directed film to take the number one spot since the poll's inception in 1952), Akerman never stopped rebelling, continuously experimenting throughout her career to challenge the formal and narrative boundaries of film.

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Set within a Catholic community deep in the south of Italy, "Corpo Celeste" is the story of 13 year-old Marta and her struggle to settle in an unfamiliar city after ten years growing up in Switzerland.

Bright-eyed, restless and feeling very much an outsider, she clashes with her family and Sunday School teacher as she begins to question the catechism of the Catholic Church and shape her own life for the first time.

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One of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, 'Tabu' is a diptych starting off in present day Lisbon where Teresa Madruga gives a luminous performance as Pilar, a woman concerned about her neighbour Aurora's eccentricities. Finally Pilar meets Gian Luca, a figure from Aurora's past.

He starts his story and the film jumps back in time to colonial Africa, where he and Aurora had a passionate love-affair. This second part is made as a quasi-silent film, with no dialogue, just music and voice-over. Former film critic Miguel Gomes both uses and slyly comments on all the techniques of cinema to make a truly virtuoso film. With a soundtrack that ranges from Lisztian piano music to cover versions of Phil Spector. 'Tabu' is just a delight. Not to mention the sad and melancholy crocodile...

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Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) work at a hospital in Mumbai, where they grapple daily with the opportunities and hardships of life in the city.

Balancing an immersive vérité style with a touch of the surreal, Payal Kapadia's Cannes Grand Prix-winning drama captures the many shades of life in India's largest metropolis. The result is a profound, deeply humanist meditation on urban migration and dislocation.

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In her remarkable portrayal that won her the 1974 Best Actress Academy Award, Ellen Burstyn stars as widow Alice Hyatt, travelling in a packed station wagon with her son along a bumpy road to a new life.

With Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, director Martin Scorsese is as much at home in the semi-rural Southwest as he is in the urban environs of his signature movies. He guides the "live a little, learn a lot" of Alice's odyssey with affection unmarred by sentiment and draws pitch-perfect performances from co-stars Kris Kristofferson, Alfred Lutter, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Vic Tayback and Oscar nominee Diane Ladd. It's a slice of life as real, funny and thought-provoking as any you've ever seen. Or lived.

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On stepping off the bus from Paris, François (Jean-Claude Brialy) quickly registers that life in his native village, Sardent, has moved on. Beneath the calm surface, an explosive cocktail of gossip, boredom, and repressed sexuality has fermented.

Ostensibly back to recuperate from a bout of tuberculosis, François soon embarks on an almost religious quest to save his former close friend Serge (Gérard Blain) from self-destructive despair and alcoholism, and so the film resonates with Christian overtones of suffering, redemption and salvation. But it's not long before François falls into the arms and bed of the voluptuous Marie (Bernadette Laffont), thereby fuelling the villagers' mounting hostility to what they widely perceive as intrusive meddling.

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A schizophrenic girl (Harriet Andersson) sinking into madness, is the focal point for the emotions of three men - her husband (Max Von Sydow) a doctor, who is helpless to cure her, her father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), who is horrified to find that he can watch her disease with complete detachment, and

her brother (Lars Passgard) for whom she represents the mysterious attractiveness of the opposite sex. A crisis is reached when, after a number of hallucinations, she seduces the boy.

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In the Donbass, war is called peace, propaganda is uttered as truth and hatred is declared to be love. In the Donbass, a region of Eastern Ukraine, a hybrid war takes place, involving an open armed conflict alongside killings and robberies on a mass scale perpetrated by separatist gangs.

A journey through the Donbass unfolds as a chain of curious adventures, where the grotesque and drama are as intertwined as life and death. This is not a tale of one region, one country or one political system. It is about a world, lost in post-truth and fake identities. It is about each and every one of us.

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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.

Robert Egger's 'Nosferatu' is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake. Starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe.

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When sugar refinery worker Aldo is jilted by his mistress, he takes to the road. With daughter in tow, Aldo wanders the Po River delta, seeking temporary – but always illusory – respite with a series of lovers, who only serve to remind him of Irma.

Unable to find a new life, Aldo's haunted past gives way to a fateful finale.

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For more than 50 years, Ingmar Bergman produced groundbreaking works of cinema that established him as one of the world's acclaimed, enduring and influential filmmakers.

The Silence (1963)

The final film in Bergman's religious triptych proved the most controversial, despite its narrative seeming more removed from direct questions of faith. Sisters Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) and Ester (Ingrid Thulin), along with Anna's young son, break their train journey in a foreign city because of Ester's ill health. The local language feels incomprehensible, the country seems on the brink of war and the hotel they reside in becomes the locus of sexual tension, humiliation and mortal anxiety. God, as the title suggests, is not even an absence in this desolate landscape.
All These Women (1964)
Bergman's first colour film brings together his favourite female leads in an ensemble satire that pokes fun at the vanity of artists and those who enable their pomposity. The women are the lovers of a lauded cellist, Felix, with whom they share a grand country estate and carefully divide his time between them. Having both indulged and infantilised Felix, they then set about humiliating a pretentious music critic who comes to visit - a narrative strand that the director seems to enjoy almost as much as his fictional harem.