agpw's - Rented List

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With a career spanning over thirty years, Louis Malle was one of the giants of French cinema.

After he burst onto the scene as one of the pioneers of the French New Wave with Lift To The Scaffold, Malle quickly achieved a reputation as a great director who was unafraid to embrace a wide array of subjects - many famously controversial. Working both in Hollywood and his native France, Malle imprinted his films with subtlety, intelligence and a sharp eye for the mores of human behaviour that set him apart from his contemporaries. This collection brings together classics from Malle's later career. Au Revoir Les Enfants, earning Malle a BAFTA for Best Director, and Lucien Lacombe are two very different tales about troubled youth set during the Second World War. Milou en Mai is a chamber comedy set against the backdrop of the 1968 Parisian uprisings and Le Souffle Au Coeur a taboo-breaking coming-of-age satire. Together with the dreamlike Black Moon, these films are proof that age did not dim Malle's humanism or commitment to experimentation.

From director-writer-producer Todd Field comes Tar, starring Cate Blanchett as the iconic musician, Lydia Tar. The film examines the changing nature of power, its impact and durability in our modern world.

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Wilhelm (Rüdiger Vogler) embarks on a journey across Germany in order to find his voice as a writer. Introspective and seemingly without personality, he encounters a series of eccentric characters, including a beautiful and enigmatic actress and a mute girl, who draw Wilhelm into their worlds.

Loosely based on Goethe's landmark novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Wim Wenders once again shows his mastery over the road movie genre and creates a brilliant character study of one man's alienation from the world around him.

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Set in Berlin, 1945, this powerful and provocative war drama retells the final days of the Second World War as recorded in the diaries of Adolf Hitler's private secretary, Traudl Junge, while barricaded with Hitler and his closest confidants in the Fuhrer's secret bunker.

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel with an astonishing performance by Bruno Ganz as history's most notorious figure, this unprecedented and controversial insider's perspective is a gripping insight into the madness and desperation of Hitler in the final hours of the war as the Russian Army closes a ring around Berlin.

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Deep within this remote landscape, facing the most hostile conditions on earth, 300 people inhabit the small village of Bakhtia. There are only two ways to reach this outpost, by helicopter and by boat. In this wilderness there are no phones, running water or medical aid.

The people live according to their own values and cultural traditions which have remained unchanged for centuries. With his wonderfully evocative narration accompanying the breath-taking imagery, Werner Herzog brings us another remarkable encounter.

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A trio of the screen's best actresses - Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore - star as three women from different eras who are linked by their common yearnings and fears.

Virginia Woolf (Kidman), in a suburb of London in the early 1920s, is battling insanity as she begins to write her first great novel, Mrs. Dalloway. A wife and a mother in post-World War II Los Angeles, Laura Brown (Moore) is reading Mrs. Dalloway and finding it so revelatory that she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life. Clarissa Vaughan (Streep), a present-day version of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, lives in New York City and is in love with a friend who is dying of AIDS.

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A young boy is taken by his Mayan father on a magical fishing trip to the Banco Chinchorro - the largest coral reef in Mexico. The reef, with its clear waters, frigate birds, egrets, and even a lounging crocodile, is like a Paradise before the fall.

But father and son must part at the end of the summer... Pedro Gonzdlez-Rubio's documentary style film is, at its simplest, a study of pure happiness and has won huge praise and numerous festival awards.

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"The Dresser" is a compelling study of the intense relationship between the leader of the company and his dresser.

Sir (Albert Finney), a grandiloquent old man of the theatre, has given his soul to career, but his tyrannical rule over the company is now beginning to crack under the strain of age and illness as he prepares for his two-hundred-twenty-seventh performance of King Lear. Sir's fastidious and fiercely dedicated dresser, Norman (Tom Courtenay), submits to Sir's frequendy unreasonable demands, tends to his health, and reminds him of what role he is currendy playing. The two men are essential to each others life.

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A true story set in Sweden in the 1900s about one woman’s impressive capacity to survive during a time of great social change and unrest. When Maria Larsson wins a camera in a lottery, her decision to keep it alters her whole life.

It enables her to see the world through new eyes, offering her a path to freedom and independence from her abusive husband.

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1940, London, the Blitz. With the country's morale at stake, inexperienced screenwriter, Catrin (Gemma Arterton) and a makeshift cast and crew, work under fire to make a film to lift the country's flagging spirits and inspire America to join the war.

Alongside fellow screenwriter, Buckley (Sam Clafiin) and a gloriously egotistical actor, Ambrose (Bill Nighy) they set off to make a film that will warm the hearts of the nation.

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When Carol (Cate Blanchett) walks into a New York City department store and meets Therese (Rooney Mara) an unlikely friendship sparks. Carol is an elegant socialite going through a bitter divorce while Therese is just starting out in life; unsure of who she wants to be.

Mesmerized by each other, they face a choice: deny their hearts desires or defy society's conventions but in doing so, risk life as they know it.

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Living in a remote Aboriginal community in the northern part of Australia, Charlie (David Gulpilil) is a warrior past his prime. As the government increases its stranglehold over the community's traditional way of life, Charlie becomes lost between two cultures.

His new modern life offers him a way to survive but, ultimately, it is one he has no power over. Finally fed up when his gun, his newly crafted spear and his best friend's jeep are confiscated, Charlie heads into the wild on his own, to live the old way. However, Charlie hasn't reckoned on where he might end up, nor on how much life has changed since the old days...

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In the heart of The Ottoman Empire during the onset of The First World War, American war-correspondent Christopher (Christian Bale) and Armenian-born Michael (Oscar Isaac) notice things are not as they seem when tensions begin to mount and prominent Armenian citizens are suddenly arrested and

executed by the ruling government. Realising this to be the start of a ruthless genocide aimed at the Armenian people Chris, Michael and thousands of exiled Armenians manage to evade capture fleeing to a remote mountain refuge where they vow to fight back against the might of The Empire in order to protect their identity and freedom.

When private eye Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is visited by an old friend, this sets in train a series of events in which he's hired to search for a missing novelist (Sterling Hayden) and finds himself on the wrong side of vicious gangsters.

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Jesmark, a struggling fisherman on the island of Malta, must make an agonising choice: repair his leaking luzzu - the traditional wooden fishing boat that has been in his family for generations - or decommission it and give in to the temptation of illicit dealing on the black market.

Featuring a Sundance Film Festival award-winning lead performance from Jesmark Scicluna - a non-professional actor and real life fisherman - Alex Camilleri's acclaimed debut feature takes inspiration from Italian Neorealist filmmakers and offers a glimpse into the beauty of an island rarely portrayed in cinema.