plastic-teaspoon's - Rented List

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The film follows the lives of six characters whose lives and stories intersect: Nicole (Laura Morante) and her unemployed partner Dan (Lambert Wilson); their estate agent Thierry (Andre Dussollier) who attempts to charm his alluring but saintly assistant Charlotte (Sabine Azema), while his sister

(Isabelle Carre) looks for love with the help of Lionel (Pierre Arditi), a bartender who hides a secret heartbreak. Exploring the themes of loneliness and longing with great humour and compassion, Resnais artfully interweaves an intricate mosaic of scenes into a wonderfully entertaining and satisfying whole.

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Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso) once more combines the considerable talents of director Michelangelo Antonioni and star Monica Vitti. Cast as Giuliana, an unhappy wife, Vitti suffers from an unnamed form of depression and malaise.

Her quicksilver emotional shifts disturb everyone around her, but they, like she, pretend that nothing is truly wrong. British engineer Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) seems to understand what Giuliana is really after in life, and he acts upon it by entering into an affair with the troubled woman. Giuliana eventually comes to terms with her physical and mental pain, but this hardly means that she's "cured" in the conventional sense.

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Highly controversial on its release for its frank and non-judgmental portrayal of taboo subjects, Le Souffle de Couer is a touchingly honest coming-of-age comedy following 14 year old Laurent (Benort Ferreux) as he experiences the turbulent trials of adolescence and tries his best to lose his

virginity. Malle's satire of post-war French bourgeois family life is acknowledged by many as the director's most enjoyable film and features a mesmerising performance from Italian actress Lea Massari as Laurent's frustrated mother.

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Shot in 1967, 'David Holzman's Diary' is a milestone in contemporary film history. Brilliantly conceived and executed, it manages to simultaneously be very much of its time and very many years ahead of its time.

The film tells the story of David Holzman, a young man infatuated with film and filmmaking. Newly unemployed and beset with doubts and worries, Holzman thinks that filming his everyday existence will 'bring life into focus'. Staged to seem like a documentary of a real person's life, Holzman's filming of his life starts to take over his life. Arguably the first 'mockumentary', it has been little seen but hugely influential on filmmakers over the years. The film is also enormously prescient about our current times, when seemingly everyone records everything to do with their lives for the camera.

Based on the Broadway hit and set to an Academy-Award-winning adaptation score, 'On the Town' changed the landscape of movie musicals, opening filmmakers' eyes to what could be done on location.

First of its collection to recreate the cinema experience of the 1940's and 50's! Recreating a good old fashioned afternoon at the flicks with a newsreel, a short and main feature with the National Anthem at the end!

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The last of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. Frederic (Bernard Verley) leads a bourgeois life; he is a partner in a small Paris office and is happily married to Helene (Françoise Verley), a teacher expecting her second child.

In the afternoons, Frederic daydreams about other women, but has no intention of taking any action. One day, Chloe (Zouzou), who had been a mistress of an old friend, begins dropping by his office. They meet as friends, irregularly in the afternoons, till eventually Chloe decides to seduce Frederic, causing him a moral dilemma.

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Senior Yakuza, Ozaki, appears to be going mad. What began as minor eccentricities have become major problems endangering not only himself but also members of his brotherhood. There is only one option left to the boss - to dispose of him.

He orders Minami to take Ozaki to the Yakuza disposal dump in Nagoya and to report him once the job is done. On the way to Nagoya, Ozaki is killed accidentally. After Minami reports the news to his boss, he returns to the car to find that the body has gone. From here, we enter a surreal world of bizarre characters and unnatural goings-on, where the only people stranger than the lactating inn owner and the autistic spiritual medium are the mysterious cow-headed demon and the Yakuza who can't make love without a strategically placed ladle for added stimulation... If you thought you'd seen it all - think again.

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Following a four-year separation, Ahmad returns to Paris from Tehran in order to finalise a divorce from his estranged French wife Marie.

During his stay, Ahmad discovers tensions in Marie's relationship with her daughter, but his attempt to build bridges between them creates conflict with her new partner, Samir, and soon unveils a secret from the past.

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One of the greatest American films of the 1950s and a high point in the careers of both the lead actor James Mason and director Nicholas Ray.

Mason gives a towering performance as Ed Avery, a happily married schoolteacher who agrees to take a new 'miracle drug' when diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease. It is not long before the drug begins producing malevolent and murderous side-effects that bring to the fore all of Ed's long-repressed frustrations with his life. Mason's support is, exceptional: Barbara Rush as Ed's devoted wife, Christopher Olsen a s his cruelly punished son and Walter Matthau as his faithful colleague. One of cinema's most persuasive portraits of psychological turmoil, the film also succeeds magnificently as searing melodrama and subversive social critique, with Ray, his scriptwriters and cinematographer achieving a perfect balance between emotional realism and exprer;sionist allegory.

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In the town of Krabi, a popular tourist destination in southern Thailand, the pre-historic, the recent past and the contemporary capitalist world awkwardly collide.

The town's local folklore and histories are promoted as attractions to tourists and commercial filmmakers, while the traditional labour force is muted and hidden from the tourists' eyes. A nameless character, whose identity continually changes, explores various sites and meets people that capture Krabi in its current state. As fact and fiction merge, the mysterious woman slowly disappears into the fabric of the narrative, and time slips between ancient and modern. A dreamlike mystery, uncovering layers of Krabi to understand how humans change a landscape.

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Filmed in sumptuous black and white, and full of scenes of lush, strange beauty, it tells the story of Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a young woman who leaves her older lover (Francisco Rabal), then drifts into a relationship with a confident, ambitious young stockbroker (Alain Delon).

But this base narrative is the starting point for much, much more, including an analysis of the city as a place of estrangement and alienation and an implicit critique of colonialism.

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When the eponymous George Riley, never seen on-screen, discovers he's been diagnosed with a terminal illness, a circle of friends (played by such powerhouses as Sabine Azema, Andre Dussollier, and Hippolyte Girardot), rally and spur him to take part in a play (another Ayckbourn work: Relatively

Speaking) with the hope of enriching his final months. Soon after, however, George regains his life-force with full verve, and reattracts the women in his group, threatening their own domestic stability.

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The film takes its title from Hitler's decree that anyone who 'endangered Germany's security' was to Vanish with out trace (in the) night and fog' of the Third Reich.

A harrowing look at concentration camps and the Holocaust, it carefully juxtaposes documentary footage, shot in black and white by the Allied troops, who liberate the camps with contemporary colour footage of a tour of the ruins of Auschwitz in the 50s. The images that Resnais presents are so haunting that any attempt to describe them in words is almost futile. How does one comment on footage chronicling the German Army executing the logic' of the 'Final Solution'.

Feature follows the exploits of the laconic Taisto, a newly-unemployed Lapland miner who sets off in a Cadillac convertible for a fresh start in Helsinki. Joined in his odyssey by meter maid Irmeli and her young son, Taitso's plans take a series of unexpected turns...