elasticpiriformis's - Rented List

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Finally released in 1946, ten years after it was shot, Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne was hailed as an 'unfinished masterpiece'. Since then, his masterly adaptation on a Maupassant story has grown in reputation to the point where it has become Renoir's best-loved film.

On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl leaves her family and fiancé for a while, and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. Shot on location on the banks of two small tributaries of the Seine, Renoir's sensuous tribute to the countryside - and to the river - has seldom been surpassed. In its bitter-sweet lyricism, its tenderness and poetic feel for nature, its tolerant satire of bourgeois conventions and its poignant sense of the transience of innocence and love, 'Partie De Campagne' seems to distil the essence of all that is most personal of Renoir's art.

In this outrageous screwball comedy, a voluptuous secretary and her handsome boss can't stop themselves from engaging in a little monkey business after a chimpanzee accidentally concocts, then dumps, an anti-ageing formula into the office water cooler.

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When Kikunosuke (Shôtarô Hanayagi), the son of a famous actor, falls in love with his brother’s nurse, Otoku (Kakuko Mori), his father vehemently opposes the affair.

Forced to cut ties with his family, Kikunosuke forges his own way in life, but his fortunes dwindle until Otoku decides to sacrifice her own future for the sake of her lover’s. Finding Mizoguchi operating at the height of his powers, 'The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums’ is a beautifully photographed and deeply moving romantic tragedy.

A priest tortures a confession out of an old woman accused of witchcraft; meanwhile his young wife (whose own mother has been suspected of being a witch) meets and falls in love with the priest's son by a former marriage.

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Based on a novel by George Bernanos, 'Diary of a Country Priest' marked the first in Director Robert Bresson's so-called "prison trilogy" (followed by 'Pickpocket' and 'A Man Escaped').

The film begins with the arrival of a young, sickly priest (Claude Laydu) at the godless parish of Ambricourt in Northern France. Here he becomes drawn into the complex domestic life of a wealthy Count (Jean Riveyre), his tormented wife, his manipulative daughter and his mistress, Miss Louise (Nicole Maurey). Narrated by excerpts of the priest's diary, the film follows his efforts to awaken the villagers from their spiritual lethargy, with their struggles, suffering and triumphs representing in a microcosm those of humankind itself. Bresson's intensely personal style, minimalist approach to dialogue and music, and use of non-professional actors marked a new kind of filmmaking, which was to influence such diverse directors as Paul Schrader, Richard Linklater and Andrei Tarkovsky.

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Made in the aftermath of the Second World War, 'Paisa' is constructed as a series of six encounters which take place during the liberation of Italy as Allied troops advance through the country from Sicily to the northern Po Valley, via Rome and Florence.

Shot on location using a non-professional cast alongside actors, the semi-documentary aesthetic and epic sweep of Paisa is both charming and devastating in its portrayal of the final days of war and the confusion that follows in its wake.

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A father (Sergi López) and his son (Bruno Núñez Arjona) arrive at a rave deep in the mountains of southern Morocco. They're searching for Mar - daughter and sister - who vanished months ago at one of these endless, sleepless parties.

Surrounded by electronic music and a raw, unfamiliar sense of freedom, they hand out her photo again and again. Hope is fading but they push through and follow a group of ravers heading to one last party in the desert. As they venture deeper into the burning wilderness, the journey forces them to confront their own limit.

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In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid 'Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), the pioneering William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making.

A couple enacts a breakup scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies, expanded thirty-five years later by its unconventional follow-up, 'Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 (2005). The "sequel" sees 'Take One' actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker reunited in a more personal, metatheatrical exploration of the effects of the passage of time on technology, the artistic process, and relationships - real and fabricated.

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Timothée Chalamet is Marty Mauser, a silver-tongues hustler with a dream that no one respects: to become the world champion table tennis player.

Hopping from one scheme to the next, Marty goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness, journeying from the Lower East Side to London, Paris, Tokyo, the Great Pyramids, and back with a trail of scorned lovers, business moguls, and mobsters hot on his tail.

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From the inimitable Billy Wilder (Double Indemnify, The Lost Weekend) comes this classic comedy that mixes romance with hard-boiled wit in a story about stiff-necked Iowa congresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur -Shane) mired in jaded postwar Berlin.

As she investigates the morale of American troops, Phoebe is cynically wooed by fellow Iowan Captain John Pringle (John Lund), who is trying to cover up his affair with Nazi-tainted chanteuse Erika von Schlutow (Marlene Dietrich). Filled with sharp dialogue and satiric jabs, 'A Foreign Affair' is one of Wilder's most beloved comedies...

An innocent young man, János (Lars Rudolph), sees violence break out after an isolated village is inflamed by the arrival of a circus and its peculiar attractions: a giant whale and a mysterious man named "The Prince".

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After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and the upheavals of May 1968 came the near religiously revered magnum opus by Jean Eustache.

In his long-unavailable body of work, ranging from documentaries about his native village to closely autobiographical narrative films, Eustache pioneered a forthright and fearless brand of realism. The pinnacle of this innovative style, 'The Mother and the Whore' follows Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a Parisian pseudo-intellectual who lives with his tempestuous girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), even as he begins a dalliance with the sexually liberated Veronika (Frangoise Lebrun), leading the three into an emotionally turbulent love triangle. Through daringly sustained long takes and confessional dialogue, Eustache captures a generation navigating the disillusionment of the 1970s, and in the process achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.

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A wildly entertaining psychological thriller, the film follows two conspiracy-obsessed young men who kidnap a powerful CEO they believe is an alien out to destroy humanity.

What begins as a paranoid act spirals into a battle of delusions and control - one as viscerally unpredictable as it is provocative.

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Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) is a 21 year old supermarket worker from a small port town in the west of Scotland. Morvern believes that life is something that you get on with as best you can with what you've got.

one morning, Morvern finds that what she's got is a dead boyfriend on the kitchen floor...

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Sergei Paradjanov's celebrated, dreamlike masterpiece paints an astonishing portrait of the 18th century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, the 'King of Song'. Paradjanov's aim was not a conventional biography but a cinematic expression of his work, resulting in an extraordinary visual poem.

Key moments in his subject's life are illustrated through a series of exquisitely orchestrated tableaux filled with rich colour and stunning iconography, each scene a celluloid painting alive with stylised movement. One of cinema's most revered and beautiful films, The Colour of Pomegranates is a unique and rewarding experience that haunts the memory long after viewing.