paul-b's - Rented List

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An exuberant family drama set in Mira Nair's beloved Punjabi culture, where ancient tradition and dot-com modernity combine in unique and perfect harmony. As the romantic monsoon rains loom, the extended Verma family reunites from around the globe for a last-minute arranged marriage in New Delhi.

Monsoon Wedding traces five intersecting stories, each navigating different aspects of love as they cross boundaries of class, continent and morality. The film celebrates a contemporary India never seen before.

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Terence Davies’s ode to his native Liverpool has wowed audiences and critics alike after being hailed as the highlight of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where it received its premiere. This is a spectacular return to form by Davies, long-hailed as one of Britain’s greatest filmmakers.

Of Time and the City is an illuminating and heartfelt work, powerfully evoking life in post-war Britain while exploring the nature of love, memory, and the toll that the passing years take on the cities and communities that we cherish. No simple documentary, it is an entrancing piece of autobiographical cinema that reaches far beyond the city in which it is set, weaving a rich tapestry from archive and contemporary footage, music, voice, literary quotation, personal reminiscence and wickedly funny observation.

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Oscar winner Jamie Foxx (Collateral, Ali) and Jake Gyllenhaal (The Day After Tomorrow, Donnie Darko) star in this critically acclaimed portrayal of a group of young "Jarheads" during the explosive days of the Gulf War.

From the Academy Award winning director of American beauty, Jarhead is a powerful story, told with painful honesty and irreverence, with spectacular cinematography. JARHEAD follows "Swoff" (Gyllenhaal)) from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi soldiers. Swoff and his fellow Marines, who have been trained to kill, find themselves in a brutal situation, fighting a war they don't understand for a cause they don't fully grasp.

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Yasujiro Ozu's elegiac final film, 'An Autumn Afternoon', charts the inevitable eclipse of older generations by irreverent youth. Revisiting the story of his earlier masterpiece Late Spring (1949), Ozu once again casts Chishu Ryu in the role of Hirayama, the concerned father to unmarried Michiko.

Harangued on all sides to marry off Michiko, Hirayama reluctantly prepares to bid his old life farewell. A cast of tragi-comic characters weaves seamlessly through this gently satirical portrayal of life's inevitable, endless cycle.

Following the accidental death of her daughter's lowlife boyfriend, respectable mother Lucia Harper instinctively hides the body to protect her family. Before long a stranger calls, sent by his partner to blackmail her. The comfort and security of Lucia's world appears to be in danger of collapsing.

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Adapted from Mary Jane Ward's autobiographical novel, Anatole Litvak's 'The Snake Pit' is a vital precursor to Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor in its concern with issues relating to mental illness.

An Oscar nominated Olivia de Havilland stars as Virginia, an outwardly normal woman whose marriage to a caring husband (Mark Stevens) unravels when her behaviour becomes erratic. On professional advice Virginia is committed to an overcrowded state hospital where she encounters the bullying antics of the resentful matrons and the threat of the fearsome snake pit, an open room where the most deranged cases are held.

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Experienced manservant Barrett (Dirk Dirk Bogarde) starts working for foppish aristocrat Tony (James Fox) in his smart new townhouse. Much to the chagrin of Tony's girlfriend (Wendy Craig), Barrett slowly insinuates himself in the house and manipulates his master by slyly rearranging the decor.

The arrival of Barrett's alluring and sexually permissive 'sister' (Sarah Miles) fatally severs the class barriers and the boundaries between master and servant, as Tony succumbs to the will of his stronger adversary.

In 1980s Perth, Australia, a depraved couple are abducting and murdering young women. When seventeen-year-old Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings) accepts a ride from the duo late one night, she finds herself catapulted into a nightmare beyond her imagining.

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When Frank's ex-junkie wife Sarah leaves him forthearms of sleazy drug-dealer Jacques, he is touched by the finger of God and decides to take the law into his own hands, becoming his own crime fighting superhero: The Crimson Bolt.

What Frank lacks in superpowers he makes up for with his trusty wrench in his one-man war on petty criminals. Powers or not, every superhero needs a sidekick! Enter Libby, a cute psychopath working at the local comic book store. Transforming into 'Boltie', Libby teams up with Frank to take Jacques down in his quest to win back his wife.

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Set in the German prison camps of WW1, the film stars Jean Gabin as Marechal, and Marcel Dalio as Rosenthal.

Like the charming aristocrat Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), these two French aviators were shot down and now spend most of their time escaping from German prison camps before inevitably being recaptured. Between escapes, they do what they can to amuse themselves, but after a tunnel they've dug is discovered, the three are sent to Wintersborn, a forbidding fortress of a prison commanded by former ace pilot Von Rauffenstein (Erich Von Stroheim). Von Rauffenstein cannot help but strike up a friendship with Captain de Boeldieu, a kindred spirit from the doomed nobility.

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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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Selma (Björk) is a Czech immigrant, a single mother working in a factory in rural America. She escapes the hardships of her tough life through the films that inspired her childhood. In her imagination she sees the world as an all-singing all-dancing Hollywood musical.

But Selma harbours a secret: she is losing her eyesight and unless she can save enough money to pay for an operation her 10 year-old son will inherit her blindness. When a desperate neighbour falsely accuses Selma of stealing, her life begins to slip beyond her control and propels itself towards a tragic and numbing finale.

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Iquitos, Peru, is a town Isolated in the middle of the jungle at the turn of the century. On the outskirts, a few shacks are rotting in the mud. In the centre are the splendid houses of the nouveaux-riches rubber barons.

It is in this setting, rich in grotesque contrast, that Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald - Fltzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski), as the natives call him - has his dream of bringing together Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt for one great celebration of Grand Opera. To finance his fantastic dream, Fitzcarraldo decides to exploit a vast area of rubber trees growing beyond the impassable Ucayala Falls. In order to circumvent this barrier, he literally has his huge steamboat lifted over a mountain from one branch of the river to the other. With the aid of a tribe of Indians bewitched by records featuring the voice of the greatest singer of all time, Fitzcarraldo fights fever, mosquitoes and suffocating heat to achieve the impossible.

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Desperately in need of a best seller to revive his struggling career, true crime writer Ellison (Ethan Hawke), moves his family to the scene of his most recent story; the unsolved, gruesome murder of a loving, happy suburban family.

Shunned by the local community and strained by his obligations to his family, the discovery of a batch of home movies in the attic offers Ellison shocking proof to the crime he is investigating and the terrifying realisation that his investigation may be putting his family in mortal danger.

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Germany in the 1970's: Murderous bomb attacks, the threat of terrorism and the fear of the enemy inside are rocking the foundations of the fragile German democracy.

The radicalized children of the Nazi generation lead by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin are fighting a violent war against what they perceive as the new face of fascism: American imperialism supported by the German establishment, many of whom have a Nazi past.Their aim is to create a more human society but by employing inhumane means they not only spread terror and bloodshed, they also lose their own humanity.