promessi's - Rented List

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After her relationship with her married lover ends after he tells he is marring someone else, Aimee (Maria de Medieros) dons her sexy red dress to try to ensnare a different rich husband so that she can live the idyllic life of a housewife.

In her quest she changes her personality and desires like a chameleon to fit whoever is the latest target. Maurice (Tierry Fortineaur), a bookseller, would be the perfect match if he didn't hate everyone in the world or was so impoverished. Instead Aimee marries a gastronomic writer only to realise that he isn't the route to the happiness she desires.

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Damien (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a Chinese civilization professor, lives with his partner, Iva (Kristin Scott Thomas), a stage director, and their son Noe. The couples relationship has drifted into routine that has drained it of love.

One day, Damien finds himself trapped by Iva, who orders him to ask his father, a senior member of the French Council of State, for help in preventing Zorica (Isabelle Carre), a woman Iva knows, from being deported. But Damien and his father don't get on and are barely ever in touch with each other. This dangerous mission throws Damien into a spiral that will turn his life upside down.

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Andrzej Wajda's dazzling Man of Marble is one of the key films of the 1970s. Often described as the 'Polish Citizen Kane', Wajda's epic masterwork operates as both an electrifying political saga and a compelling analysis of the nature of cinema itself.

Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer, glorified as a State-promoted 'Worker's Hero' is subsequently removed from all official mention in 1952. In 1976 a young filmmaker, Agnieszka, obsessively pursues his story. Birkut's rise and fall and disappearance into obscurity provides Wajda with a framework for a brave reassessment of the period. Although suppressed by the authorities, Man of Marble became a milestone in Polish cinema and an undoubted influence in the dismantling of the totalitarian system in Poland.

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Miklos Jancso is one of cinema's greatest visionaries and his Red Psalm is a formidable work of art from a master filmmaker at the peak of his powers. Depicting a series of peasant uprisings in Hungary in the late 19th century, the film celebrates the cause of revolutionary struggle.

Inspired by folklore and song, Jancso's camera travels amongst groups of moving figures in an elaborate cinematic ballet and his singular use of film form achieves a resonance and beauty that is extraordinary. Radical in execution and poetic in its achievement, Red Psalm reaches beyond political dogma to expose a more universal, and deeper, truth that remains relevant today.

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In the hypothetical Latin-American country of Eldorado, the idealistic and anarchist poet and journalist Paulo Martins (Jardel Filho) fights against the populist governor, Felipe Vieira (Jose Lewgoy), and the conservative president Porfirio Diaz (Paulo Autran), supported by revolutionary forces.

Paulo is depressed, since the two corrupt politicians were his former friends and have been elected with his moral support-Paulo Martins opposes the two equally corrupt political candidates. Paulo is torn between the madness of the elite and the blind submission of the masses.

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Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), an American writer living in Rome, inadvertently witnesses a brutal attack on a woman (Eva Renzi) in a modern art gallery. Powerless to help, he grows increasingly obsessed with the incident.

Convinced that something he saw that night holds the key to identifying the maniac terrorising Rome, he launches his own investigation parallel to that of the police, heedless of the danger to both himself and his girlfriend Giulia (Suzy Kendall)...

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When "The Jazz Singer" was released in theatres, the future of Hollywood changed. For the first time in a feature film, an actor spoke on screen, stunning audiences and leaving the silent era behind.

Al Jolson was the history-making actor, playing the son of a Jewish cantor who must defy his rabbi father in order to pursue his dream of being in show business.

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Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly render the very spirit of Franciscan teaching in this extraordinary fresh and simple film - largely unappreciated at the time of its release, but now regarded as one of his greatest.

Shot in a neorealist manner with non-professional actors (including thirteen actual Franciscan monks) it avoids the pious cliches of haloed movie saints with an economy of expression and a touching, human quality.

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It's the summer of 1944, after the fall of Mussolini. As the Germans take control of Italy from the north and the Allies do the same from the south, ordinary Italians face a deadly conflict of loyalties.

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani lived through this as teenagers, and they later turned their memories and those of countless compatriots into this extraordinarily rich and vivid evocation of the most terrifying time in their native Tuscany's history, where even the most respected authority figures can no longer be trusted and seemingly throwaway decisions can prove fatal. The Tavianis' creative masterstroke was to present all this through the eyes of a six-year-old girl, who despite the death and destruction around her is having the most exciting time of her life.

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Filipino director Lino Brocka was a force of nature in world cinema, his powerful work illuminating the harsh social realities of life in his home country.

His films have been largely unavailable, but now, thanks to Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, his two finest works have been rescued from obscurity and restored in 4K. A fascinating portrait of life in Manila's corrupt, teeming urban jungle, 'Manila in the Claws of Light' finds Julio, a 21-year-old rural fisherman, arriving in the Filipino capital to look for his girlfriend. Robbed of his cash, he struggles to survive, drifting through the city in search of his beloved. 'Insiang' is the story of a girl who, having been raped by her mother's boyfriend, seeks comfort in the arms of her would-be suitor, Bebot. Finding him little better than her attacker, she is forced to return home where she sets about exacting her revenge.

Newly employed at a run-down London swimming baths, Mike (John Moulder-Brown) obsesses after his sassy and self-assured co-worker (Jane Asher) whilst collecting tips for the 'special services' he is expected to perform for clients (including Diana Dors).

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Voted the best Czech film of all time, Marketa Lazarová is a powerful and passionate medieval epic set in the mid-13th Century.

Based on avant-garde writer Vladislav Vancura’s novel, it follows the rivalry between two warring clans, the Kozlíks and the Lazars, and the doomed love affair of Mikolá Kozlík and Marketa Lazarová. Vlacil draws upon remote historical sources to recreate an authentic primitive world and fashion a film with surprising contemporary impact. Owing as much to the stylistic vigour of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai as it does to the rich tapestry of Czech fiction, this ambitious and poetically extraordinary film is the crowning achievement of Vlacil's career and an undiscovered cornerstone of world cinema.

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Bergman's masterpiece of self-doubt, identity and eroticism is an audacious example of cinematic art. The notional story centres on newly mute actor Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) recuperating at her coastal holiday home in the care of a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson).

As tensions between the pair grow, their very selves seem to blur, chronology becomes uncertain and what is real and unreal loses significance. Yet the true impact of Persona goes beyond mere storytelling, touching, as Bergman said, 'wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover'.

In 1959, Kit (Martin Sheen) who has killed several people, and his new girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek), who watched him do it, are adrift in a double fantasy of crime and punishment across South Dakota and Montana. They're playing make-believe but the bullets and bloodshed are very real...

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On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the world’s tallest buildings.

After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. Following six and a half years of dreaming of the towers, Petit spent eight months in New York City planning the execution of the coup. Aided by a team of friends and accomplices, Petit was faced with numerous extraordinary challenges: he had to find a way to bypass the WTC’s security; smuggle the heavy steel cable and rigging equipment into the towers; pass the wire between the two rooftops; anchor the wire and tension it to withstand the winds and the swaying of the buildings.