promessi's - Rented List

In the middle of the Second World War, Alyosha (Vladimir Ivashov) is commended for destroying two German tanks. Rather than take a medal, he requests a four-day pass to visit his mother. The film is about this journey and the life enhancing encounters therein.

When the banks committed the greatest fraud in US history, four outsiders risked it alt to take them down. Based on the unbelievable true story and best-selling book from the author of 'The Blind Side' and 'Moneyball', critics are calling 'The Big Short' "slick and funny".

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This is the story of French gangster Jacques Mesrine, whose twenty year criminal career across several continents earned him the reputation of being a one-man crime-wave.

A ruthless gangster, serial jail-breaker and master of disguise, Mesrine justly earned the nickname "man of a thousand faces" and was France's most notorious Public Enemy Number 1. Lethally seductive, irresistibly energetic and dangerously charismatic, Jacques - Mesrine lives life on the run after his escape from prison in May 1978. But will the police ever catch him?

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Set in and around the corridors of power, 'Bodyguard' tells the story of David Budd (Richard Madden), a heroic but volatile war veteran now working as a Specialist Protection Officer for the Royalty and Specialist Protection Branch (RaSP) of London's Metropolitan Police Service.

When he is assigned to protect the ambitious and powerful Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes), Budd finds himself torn between his duty and his beliefs. Responsible for her safety, could he become her biggest threat?

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Harold Pinter (1930-2008) was one of the most important and influential British playwrights of the last century. While best known for his work for the stage, this collection celebrates Pinter's significant contribution to television.

His work for the screen shares many of the qualities of that for the stage, from a fascination with the private roots of power and an abiding preoccupation with memory, to a belief in the agency of women. Featuring 10 plays made for the BBC between 1965 and 1988, and previously unavailable on video.

The Plays:
1. Old Times (1975)
2. The Hothouse (1982)
3. Mountain Language (1988)
4. The Basement (1967)
5. A Slight Ache (1967)
6. A Night Out (1967)
7. Monologue (1972)
8. Tea Party (1965)
9. Landscape (1983)
10. The Birthday Party (1987)

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An irreverent, uplifting comedy about friendship, trust and human possibility.

Based on a true story of friendship between handicapped millionaire (Francois Cluzet) and his street smart ex-con caretaker (Omar Sy), "Untouchable" depicts an unlikely camaraderie rooted in honesty and humour between two individuals who, on the surface, would seem to have nothing in common.

A recovering alcoholic (Maurice Ronet) decides to commit suicide. He spends 24 hours wandering through Paris and visiting old friends, hoping to find some meaning to life and a reason to go on living.

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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.

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Two of the giants of film-acting come together as a married couple living in crisis: Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. He is a renowned author and 'public intellectual'; she is 'the wife.

' Over the course of one day and the night into which it inevitably bleeds, the pair will come to re-examine their emotional bonds, and grapple with the question of whether love and communication are even possible in a world built out of profligate idylls and sexual hysteria.

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Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme direct this French documentary exploring life in Paris in May 1962. Following the end of the Algerian War, it was the first spring in 23 years that the country had not been engaged in conflict.

The footage includes interviews with members of the public who discuss their own lives as well as wider social and political topics.

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Double bill of France comedy.

Let's Make a Dream...(1936)

Kicking off with a brilliant prologue featuring cameos from some of the luminaries of the French stage and screen (Arletty, Michel Simon, and more), 'Let's Make a Dream'...(Faisons un reve...) shifts into exploring the manoeuvres of an inbetween-hours love-triangle played out by Guitry, his then-wife Jacqueline Delubac, and Pagnol's very own Cesar, the paragon Raimu.
Let's Go Up the Champs-Elysees (1938)
Let Guitry take you down cause he's going to...Elysées Fields .

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Set in 1970's Santa Barbara, '20th Century Women' is the story of Dorothea (Annette Bening), a single mother, and her son Jamie, as he comes of age at a time brimming with cultural change and rebellion.

As life challenges both of them in new ways, Dorothea enlists the help of two younger women in Jamie's upbringing; Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a free-spirited punk artist living as a lodger in their home, and Julie (Elle Fanning), a savvy and provocative teenage neighbour.

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Malle's a debut feature, made when he was only 25 is a tense thriller starring Jeanne Moreau as Florence and Julian Tavernier as Maurice, a pair of lovers who conspire to murder Florence's husband in the most ingenious manner. However, not everything goes quite as planned.

Lift to the Scaffold is arguably the first film of the French New Wave with its arresting camerawork by cinematographer Henri Decae, who also shot the debut film of Truffaut and Chabrol. With its sultry black and white palate, Paris locations and an improvised jazz score by the legendary Miles Davis, Lift to the Scaffold is an unforgettable slice of 50s French cool.

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Directed in 1956, the year that prostitution was outlawed in Japan, 'Flowing' explores the inner workings of a changing world, as traditional geishas faced the impending decline of their hidden way of life and the looming spectre of prostitution.

It depicts the story of a widow, Rika (Kinuyo Tanaka), who is forced to work for a living and becomes a maid in a struggling Tokyo geisha house where its proud mistress (Isuzu Yamada) tries to save the house from becoming either a restaurant or a brothel. It is through Rika that we are introduced to the various geishas, who drink and fight, worry over the lack of clients, and attempt to stave off imminent extinction.

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"Come and See" is one of the greatest war films ever made and one of the finest achievements of Soviet cinema.

A devastating account of the Nazi occupation of Belarussia during World War II, it tells the story of a young boy's abrupt loss of innocence when he joins the Soviet resistance and is thrust headlong into the brutal horrors of combat. Featuring terrifyingly authentic battle scenes and poetic, almost surreal imagery, director Elem Klimov has fashioned a vivid and unforgettably powerful portrait of the terrible atrocities committed by men in the name of war.