monsieurk's - Rented List

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Acclaimed director Chantal Akerman becomes the latest filmmaker to take inspiration from Marcel Proust’s epic masterwork 'In Search of Lost Time'. Adapted from the fifth volume, 'The Captive' tells the story of Ariane, who lives under her lover Simon’s surveillance in a grandiose Parisian apartment.

Simon harbours an obsessional need to know everything about her. He has her accompanied everywhere she goes and subjects her to endless questioning. Knowing of Ariane’s attraction to women, Simon imagines that she leads a double life, which only serves to increase his desire for her. Akerman’s film is an elegantly constructed and compelling meditation on love, desire and obsession.

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Famous puppeteers Judy (Mia Wasikowska) and her husband Punch (Damon Herriman) live in the town of Seaside. A strange place that is located nowhere near any sort of coastline, the town and its inhabitants are in thrall to a frenzy of witch hunts and superstition.

But while the townspeople revel in the drama of the various trials and punishments, 'Judy and Punch' provide welcome distraction with their magical puppet show. However, temptation can be found in every dark corner of Seaside, and the charismatic Punch succumbs to the women, the ale and adulation that await him at the local tavern. Despairing at her husband's weakness, Judy forces the hungover Punch to focus on his responsibilities and leaves him to mind their baby for a morning, the repercussions of which lead to an ill-fated turn of events that Judy must avenge...

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Wang Xiaoshuai's deeply moving and intimate drama traces the lives of two interconnected families over three decades of social and political upheaval in China.

The film charts the fortunes of factory workers Liyun (Yong Mei) and Yaojun (Wang Jingchun), a couple reeling from a devastating family tragedy during the tumultuous years between the 1980's and the 21st century. Constricted by the one-child national policy, their lives are gradually transformed under the impact of the country's changing identity, building to a heartbreaking revelation that exposes how political reality affects the fates of the family and the people around them. A cleverly poetic depiction of communist China, 'So Long, My Son' is a sprawling yet personal portrait of human resilience, featuring incredibly tender and award-winning performances from Mei and Jingchun.

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In a deserted Macedonian village, Hatidze, a 50-something woman, trudges up a hillside to check her bee colonies nestled in the rocks. Serenading them with a secret chant, she gently manoeuvres the honeycomb without netting or gloves.

Back at her homestead, Hatidze tends to her handmade hives and her bedridden mother, occasionally heading to the capital to market her wares. One day, an itinerant family installs itself next door, and Hatidze's peaceful kingdom gives way to roaring engines, seven shrieking children, and 150 cows. Yet Hatidze welcomes the camaraderie, and she holds nothing back - not her tried-and-true beekeeping advice, not her affection, not her special brandy. But soon Hussein, the itinerant family's patriarch, makes a series of decisions that could destroy Hatidze's way of life forever.

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Claudio is a middle-aged lawyer with a prosperous life in a placid provincial town in mid-70's Argentina, just before the military coup.

One night he enters a restaurant where he is verbally attacked by a mysterious stranger, their argument continues on the street outside, and then escalates even more with drastic consequences. A few months later a friend comes to see Claudio about an abandoned house that he is interested in buying. The two incidents come back to haunt Claudio later with the arrival of a Chilean private detective who is intent on locating the missing stranger, who, it turns out, is a relative of one of Claudio's friends. Claudio's life is possibly about to unravel.

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Modern-day Cornish fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe) is struggling to buy a boat while coping with family rivalry and the influx of London money, Airbnb and stag parties to his harbour village.

The summer season brings simmering tensions between the locals and newcomers to boiling point, with tragic consequences.

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Described as 'one of the most audacious fictions ever made about the Holocaust', Passenger is a classic of Polish cinema. Director Munk died, aged just 39, in a car crash in the middle of filming.

His friend and colleague Witold Lesiewicz decided to complete the film to what he believed were Munk's intentions and assembled it using the existing footage, Munk's photographs and a voice-over narration. On release the film won main awards at the Cannes and Venice film festivals and is widely considered a masterpiece. Unseen for far too long, this is the first-ever DVD release of this unique film.

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When teacher Junpei Niki misses his last bus home after a day out collecting insects on a remote stretch of coast, he is invited by a local villager to take shelter in a young widow's ramshackle hut.

Ignoring the fact that her home is at the bottom of a sandpit accessible only by rope ladder, he accepts this hospitality without realising he is the victim of a cruel trick. Trapped, he is forced into an uneasy life with this woman, sharing with her the Sisyphean task of shoveling the sand that threatens to engulf them.

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Luo (Jue Huang) returns to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled many years before. Luo recalls the death of an old friend, Wildcat (Hong-Chi Lee), and searches for his lost love Wan Qiwen (Wei Tang) who continues to haunt him. Bi's film sculpts time and space with huge virtuosity.

With talismanic cues and motifs of uncanny doubling, the film is bisected, its first half recast in the second through a vertiginous, trance-inducing, hour-long single take in 3D. A hypnotic study of hazy memory, lost time, and flight, 'Long Day's Journey into Night' take you on a nocturnal, labyrinthine voyage.

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When sadistic young thugs senselessly attack John Wick, a brilliantly lethal ex-assassin, they have no idea that they've just awakened the boogeyman.

With New York City as his bullet-riddled playground, Wick embarks on a merciless rampage, hunting down his adversaries with the skill and ruthlessness that made him an underworld legend.

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Deep in the shadows of the attic of an ordinary family home in the Tokyo suburbs, something malevolent is stirring.

When social worker Rika (Megumi Okina) is sent to check on a traumatised old lady whose family have moved in at the site of the notorious Saeki family murder case, she unwittingly unleashes a cycle of terror that is transmitted via its victims further and further from its original source.

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A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, passionate affair in post war Hiroshima.

Their deeply intense connection brings out scarred but fading memories of love and suffering, which Resnais communicates with the use of flashback techniques innovative to the time.

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To celebrate his 60th birthday, family patriarch Helge Klingelfeldt throws a lavish dinner party for all his friends and family.

After years of tense estrangement Helge is particularly anxious that his three children, Christian, Michael and Helene support the party's festive mood by parading an impression of a happy and loving family. However, th eldest son's speech serves only to expose a secret that descends the celebration into a tragic and heartbreaking night that will never be forgotten.

Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), naive insurance man. Falls for the seductive charms of his beautiful client Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) Together they plot to get rid of her dull husband and collect on the "double indemnity" life policy.

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Denigrated by the public, vilified by the critics, re-cut at the insistence of its producers, and finally banned by the French government as 'demoralising' and unpatriotic, La Regle du jeu was a commercial disaster at the time of its original release.

On the surface, a series of interlinked romantic intrigues taking place at a weekend shooting party in a country chateau, the film is in fact a study of the corruption and decay within French society on the eve of the outbreak of World War II.