paul-b's - Rented List

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Two ordinary inner-city Chicago kids dare to reach for the impossible -professional basketball glory - in this epic chronicle of hope and faith.

Filmed over a five-year period, 'Hoop Dreams', by Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert, follows young Arthur Agee and William Gates and their families as the boys navigate the complex, competitive world of scholastic athletics while dealing with the intense pressures of their home lives and neighbourhoods. This revelatory film continues to educate and inspire viewers, and it is widely considered one of the great works of American nonfiction cinema.

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Nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall makes her sizzling screen debut in the first of 4 films she made opposite Humphrey Bogart. he plays a cynical American expatriate swept up in the fighting of the French resistance - and swept off his feet by an alluring young drifter - Bacall.

Set on the island of Martinique in 1940, the film features smouldering performances from the legendary couple.

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One of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made and a mind-bending free-form travelogue, 'La Jetee' and 'Sans Soleil' couldn't seem more different - but they're the twin pillars of an unparalleled and uncompromising career in cinema.

Filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, videographer, and digital multimedia artist, Chris Marker challenged moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his investigations of time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. These two films - a tale of time travel told in still images and a journey to Africa and Japan - remain his best-loved and most widely seen.

La Jetee (1962)
This unique film was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. It is a cinematic landmark using black and white stills almost entirely to narrate the story. Set in Paris destroyed by a third world war, the survivors have been forced to retreat underground where scientists conduct strange time travel experiments to escape from a terrible present to a better past or future...
Sans Soleil (1983)
Director Chris Marker takes the viewer into a different dimension, weaving footage from Japan, Africa, Iceland, France and the USA to produce a study of 'the dreams of the human race'. He is particularly attracted to the two extremes of Japan and Africa, and discusses the images that he creates with the woman, ever mindful of the astonishing store of memory he has created.

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Prohibition era gangster Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) walks out of prison...and into two unfamiliar worlds: the jitterbugging 1940s and the towering majesty of 'High Sierra'. This fast-paced, heist-gone-wrong manhunt movie is also a fascinating study of a man time has passed by.

Earle identifies more with the era's homeless Okies than the callow punks he leads on a disastrous hotel robbery. Then the teenager he loves (Joan Leslie) rejects him and only Marie (Ida Lupino), a weary '30s survivor like himself, remains loyal when cops close in.

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The Chase. The Desert. The Shack. The Girl. The Roadblock. The End. One man races against time, against destiny, against the road: the ultimate car chase movie. Kowalski (Barry Newman) is the last American hero.

He's the lone stranger - a modern cowboy in a white Dodge Challenger who bets that he can drive from Denver to San Francisco in fifteen hours. Loaded with amphetamines and a full tank, he takes to the open highway. In his supercharged Challenger he breaks through every speed trap, dragnet and roadblock in four states to become an instant cult hero...

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Based on Lionel White's novel 'Obsession', 'Pierrot le Fou' transforms a story about a couple on the run into an entertaining, existential romance. Tired of his bourgeois life, Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) leaves his wife and elopes with his former baby sitter, Marianne (Anna Karina).

When a dead body is found in Marianne's apartment, the two lovers flee to the South of France in a futile bid to escape Marianne's dangerous past.

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In the not-so-distant future, Earth is barren of all flora and fauna, with what remains of the planet's former ecosystems preserved aboard a fleet of greenhouses orbiting in space.

When the crews are ordered to destroy the remaining specimens, one botanist, Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), rebels and flees towards Saturn in a desperate bid to preserve his own little piece of Earth that was, accompanied only by the ship's three service robots.

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In an alternate reality of present-day Oakland, California, telemarketer Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield), finds himself in a macabre universe after he discovers a magical key that leads to material glory.

As Green's career begins to take off, his friends and co-workers organise a protest against corporate oppression. Cassius soon falls under the spell of Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), a cocaine-snorting CEO who offers him a salary beyond his wildest dreams.

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Gillo Pontecorvo's multi-award winning picture 'The Battle of Algiers' has perhaps never been as pertinent as it is now. Set from 1954 to 1962, the movie uses documentary-style black and white photography to recreate real events.

Algerian liberation fighters use terrorist techniques against the French colonial occupiers; the French retaliate with brutal military force. Brilliantly directed set-pieces and remarkable crowd scenes make the film a masterpiece; the ominous familiarity of its subject makes it a must-see" - The Times How to win battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in Cafes. Sounds familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.'' - Pentagon tlyer for their in-house screening of Battle Of Algiers All the armies of the world - including the Pentagon - will never, but never, be able to conquer a country which wants to control its own destiny" - Saadi Yacef

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After Wyatt Earp's (Henry Fonda) brother James is murdered by cattle rustlers, the frontier legend becomes Tombstone's marshal and sets out to avenge the younger man's death.

Torn between his badge and his fury, Earp confronts the likely killers, the notoriously lawless family of Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan), setting the stage for the famed shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Along the way, Earp falls in love with a schoolteacher named Clementine (Cathy Downs), which pits him against the cantankerous Doc Holliday. While 'My Darling Clementine' never loses its dynamism as a hard-hitting western, it is also a tender love story.

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The film that brought Jacques Tati international acclaim also launched his on-screen alter ego: the courteous, well-meaning, eternally accident-prone Monsieur Hulot with whom Tati would from now on be inseparably associated.

As with Jour de fete, Vacances is set in a sleepy French coastal resort which is seasonally disrupted by holidaymakers in energetic pursuit of fun. At the centre of the chaos is the eccentric Hulot, struggling at all times to maintain appearances, but somehow entirely divorced from his immediate surroundings. There is little plot in Tati's beautifully orchestrated 'ballet' of comic action: it's a series of incidents, a seamless succession of gently studies of human absurdity.

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A dreary prison cell is shared by two men who, in terms of lifestyle, could not be further apart. Molina (William Hurt) is a homosexual convicted for obscene behaviour, the other, Valentin (Raul Julia), is a revolutionary who has been continually tortured by the same totalitarian authorities.

As the minutes slowly pass, Molina invents a story based on the glamorous cinema of yesteryear - a Nazi propaganda film involving an unlikely love affair. At first, this extravagant display of personality doesn't bode well for the cellmates' relationship but as time and the story progresses a new kind of friendship begins to blossom.

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Lana Turner is Lora, whose search for success as an actress causes her to neglect her daughter, Sandra Dee. Juanita Moore stars as Lora's black housekeeper whose daughter repudiates her mother by trying to pass for white.

As the years pass, each of the four women realises that she has been living out an emotionally fruitless existence.

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"A Simple Favor", directed by Paul Feig, centers around Stephanie (Anna Kendrick), a mommy vlogger who seeks to uncover the truth behind her best friend Emily's (Blake Lively) sudden disappearance from their small town.

Stephanie is joined by Emily's husband Sean (Henry Golding) in this stylish thriller filled with twists and betrayals, secrets and revelations, love and loyalty, murder and revenge.

Based on Thomas Harris' first story of Hannibal Lecktor, 'Red Dragon', 'Manhunter' introduced this popular character to an unsuspecting public. It remains a cult classic and is considered the most prominent landmark in Mann's career.