sta's - Rented List

Amid accusations of talent-wasting, composer Arthur Sullivan (Maurice Evans) joins forces with dramatist W.S. Gilbert (Robert Morley) and impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte (Peter Finch) in a partnership to create what ultimately became some of the most innovative and successful music ever created.

Show moreShow less

Fourteen-year-old Tyler (Conrad Khan) attends a pupil referral unit, where he is isolated and bullied. At home he must look after his younger sister Aliyah (Tabitha Milne-Price) while his mother, Toni (Ashley Madekwe), works nights.

When the preoccupied and exhausted Toni loses her job, she thrusts the family into a desperate financial situation, leaving Tyler vulnerable to a 'recruiter' who targets children to promote a drug-dealing enterprise out of the city. This powerful drama about a mother and her son who is groomed into a lethal nationwide drugs network - a 'county line' - is inspired by Henry Blake's first-hand experience as a youth worker on the frontline of child exploitation and drug trafficking in the UK.

Show moreShow less

In the final moments of the last World War, the only dream for one man was trying to get home to see his wife and child. 'World War II: The Long Road Home' is an epic achievement. Seen through the eyes of the director's Great Grandfather it follows his extraordinary journey across war torn Europe.

Escaping from a prisoner of war camp, exhausted, hungry, constantly dodging bands of soldiers and fighting for every mile home. This extraordinary true story is one that will stay with you long after the film has finished.

Show moreShow less

Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve), an ageing movie star, is about to publish her long-awaited memoirs. Sparks immediately fly when her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) returns to Paris from New York to confront this rose-tinted version of their family history.

However, as the past is gradually addressed, their strained relationship takes a journey toward possible reconciliation. Also starring Ethan Hawke, 'The Truth' paints a moving portrait of family dynamics and human relationships.

Show moreShow less

"Molly's Game" is based on the incredible true story of Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), a former Olympic-class skier who ran the world's most exclusive high-stakes poker game for a decade before being arrested by armed FBI agents.

Her players included Hollywood royalty, sports stars, business titans and finally, unbeknownst to her, the Russian mob. Her only ally was her criminal defense lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba), who learned that there was much more to Molly than the tabloids led us to believe.

Show moreShow less

Considered one of the 20th century's most influential writers and the pioneer of 'stream of consciousness' writing, the life of Virginia Woolf is explored in this insightful new documentary.

Drawing upon key biographers and literary critics, the programme seeks to understand a remarkable creative life. After abuse as a child and the death of her mother when she was 13, Virginia Woolf was troubled by breakdowns and suicide attempts from an early age. But increasingly from 1915 onwards, when she published her first novel 'The Voyage Out', Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays, letters, diaries and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press. She was a founder member and at the centre of what was to become the Bloomsbury Group and wrote the classic novels 'Mrs. Dalloway', 'Orlando', 'To the Lighthouse' and 'The Waves'. Despite great success and critical acclaim, darkness haunted her. Compounded by the destruction of the First World War, yet helped by her pursuit of a working life free from the domination of a patriarchal, misogynist culture, she was unable to fully break free from it. Contributors Dame Hermione Lee, Dr Lyndall Gordon, Professor Edward Mendelsohn, Bill Goldstein and Professor Nicole Ward Jouve discuss Woolf's extraordinary life, including her affair with Vita Sackville West, her great creative achievement and her impact on both the literary and the modern world.

Show moreShow less

The Secret Garden, tells the story of Mary Lennox, a 10 year old girl sent to live with her uncle Archibald Craven, under the watchful eye of Mrs Medlock with only the household maid, Martha for company.

The film is set in 1940's England at Misselthwaite Manor, a remote country estate deep in the Yorkshire moors. Mary begins to uncover many family secrets, particularly after chancing upon her cousin Colin (Edan Hayhurst), who has been shut away unwell in a wing of the house. Whist exploring the grounds of the Misselthwaite Manor, Mary discovers a wondrous garden and meets a local boy Dickon (Amir Wilson), who helps her fix stray dog Hector's injured leg using the garden's restorative powers. The three children adventure deep into the mysteries of the garden a magical place that will change their lives forever.

Show moreShow less

By a little bay near Marseilles lies a picturesque villa owned by an old man.

His three children have gathered by his side for his last days: Angela (Ariane Ascaride), an actress living in Paris, Joseph (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who has just fallen in love with a girl half his age and Armand (Gérard Meylan), the only one who stayed behind in the bay to run the family's small restaurant. It's time for them to weigh up what they have inherited of their father's ideals and the community spirit he created in this magical place. The arrival, at a nearby cove, of a group of boat people will throw these moments of reflection into turmoil.

Show moreShow less

Experience the gripping tale of pride, remorse, and redemption set among the 19th-century Russian working class in Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'.

Two-time Academy Award-nominee John Hurt stars in this moving BBC dramatization that brings to life the classic story of an antihero doomed by his misguided sense of intellectual moral authority. A former student with fierce and rational intellect, Raskolnikov feels that he is above the law and even capable of shedding blood without penalty. When he commits a murderous act, he is forced to confront his inner demons as well as a clever adversary determined to bring a killer to justice.

Show moreShow less

The film interweaves linked themes: an analysis of the life of Rudyard Kipling; the story of Rudyard Kipling's devastation at the deaths of two of his three children; and the three short stories Kipling wrote around these deaths - 'They', 'Mary Postgate' and 'The Gardener', all deeply moving, dark

and sometimes violent. In 1904 Kipling and his six-year-old daughter Josephine had simultaneously fallen gravely ill on a trip to the US. The illness spared Kipling but killed Josephine. He never got over her death. She was a child of enormous beauty and grace. With her death Kipling lost part of himself. In 1915 John Kipling was killed at the Battle of Loos in what was an agonising death. With the death of John, Kipling had now lost two of his three children. Their deaths provoke both the utter desolation which will consume and kill this great writer and give birth to the elegiac passages of 'They' and the chillingly prophetic 'Mary Postgale', two of the short stories which lie at the heart of this film. In Kipling's bedroom at his house Batemans to this day are his son's cricket bat and his daughter's portrait.

Show moreShow less

Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot - his only adaptation of a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel - was a cherished project on which it is claimed he expended more effort than on any other film.

A darkly ambitious exploration of the depths of human emotion, it combines the talents of two of the greatest Japanese actors of their generation - Toshiro Mifune and Setsuko Hara. The Idiot is perhaps the most contemplative of all Kurosawa's work, a tone which is heightened by the unusual, trance-like performances. Kurosawa's electrifying dramatisation uproots the novel's Russian Summer setting to a memorable, snowbound Hokkaido - the northern-most island of Japan, closest to Russia in climate and custom. War criminal Kameda (Masayuki Mori), reprieved from a death sentence, is fresh out of the asylum, mentally fragile, and prone to epileptic fits. In turn, his emotional involvement with two women (Setsuko Hara and Yoshiko Kuga) and his new, increasingly volatile friend Akama (Toshiro Mifune) lead him further into madness and gross tragedy.

Show moreShow less

E. M. Forster wrote 'The Longest Journey' in 1907, before his full adult life had started. The film reflects Forster's view that this book, above all his books, describes what he felt was to happen to him in his own life. Said to be E.M.

Forster's own favourite of all his novels - and the most autobiographical - 'The Longest Journey' was published in 1907 and is described by Forster as the one he is 'most glad to have written'. 'EM Forster: His Longest Journey' traces Forster's growing recognition of his development as a writer, of his homosexuality and his need to initiate himself into his own true nature. We understand Forster's extraordinary sexual shyness and diffidence in his youth and his sexual promiscuity after his great success with 'Passage to India'. Through interviews with his biographers and literary critics, the film traces the resonances in Forster's life that that are intimated in the novel. We learn of his lovers and his final long relationship with Bob Buckingham, the good-looking policeman, in whose wife's arms Forster died. The film includes appearances by James Ivory, David Lean and Helena Bonham Carter. It features extracts from 'Howards End' and 'Maurice' and scenes from the set of 'A Passage to India'.

Show moreShow less

"Never Look Away" tells the story of a young art student, Kurt (Tom Schilling) who falls in love with fellow classmate, Ellie (Paula Beer). Ellie's father, Professor Seeband (Sebastian Koch), a famous doctor, is dismayed at his daughter's choice of boyfriend, and vows to destroy the relationship.

What neither of them knows is that their lives are already connected through a terrible crime Seeband committed decades before...

Show moreShow less

London 1940: As the Blitz rages and her future is threatened by fallout from the war, Agatha Christie (Helen Baxendale) makes the decision to kill off her most famous creation. After twelve Poirot novels in six years, Agatha should be a rich woman. Instead, she's struggling to make ends meet.

Killing Poirot in the midst of this turmoil seems almost spiteful, but Agatha has a plan: she's selling the novel to a private buyer, a super-fan who will pay anything to own a piece of history. A meeting at an infamous London hotel is arranged, where despite the presence of an old friend, things quickly go wrong. As the bombs fall and the bodies pile up, the real danger of her situation becomes apparent: the only thing more valuable than the last ever Poirot novel is the last ever book written by Agatha Christie.

Show moreShow less

She risked everything to stop an unjust war. Her government called her a traitor.

Based on true events, 'Official Secrets' tells the story of Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), a British intelligence specialist who received a shocking memo in 2003: the United States is enlisting Britain's help in blackmailing United Nations Security Council members so they vote in favour of the Iraq War. Unable to stand by, Gun defies her government and leaks the memo to the press, beginning an explosive chain of events that will ignite an international firestorm, expose a vast political conspiracy, and put Gun and her family in harm's way.