griggs's - Rented List

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Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is a veteran film director, afflicted by multiple ailments, the worst of which is his inability to continue filming. His physical condition doesn't allow it and, if he can't film, his life has no meaning.

His mixture of medications, along with the occasional flirtation with heroin, means that Salvador spends most of his days prostrate and forlorn. This drowsy state transports him back to reflect on his childhood in the 60's, when his family emigrated to Paterna, a village in Valencia, in search of prosperity, through to the appearance of his first desire and his first adult love in the Madrid of the 80's. In recovering his past, Salvador finds the urgent need to recount it, and in that need he may also find his salvation.

Life on the assembly line stinks. Glue the windshield...One car a minute. 55 an hour. 220,000 a year. The pay is lousy. The union is crooked. Life is an endless list of unpaid bills. And now, three workers are plotting the ultimate heist to set themselves free.

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Joe Wilson, a wrongly jailed man thought to have died in a blaze started by a bloodthirsty lynch mob, is somehow alive. And dead to all he ever stood for and perhaps ever will be. Because Joe aims to ensure his would-be executioners meet the fate Joe miraculously escaped.

Spencer Tracy is Joe, Sylvia Sidney is his bride-to-be and "Fury" lives up to its volatile name with its searing indictment of mob justice and lynching.

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A towering achievement of world cinema, Sergei Parajanov's modernist landmark fuses folkloric traditions, animistic mysticism, and hallucinatory visual invention.

Adapted from a 1911 novella by Ukrainian writer Mykhailo A towering achievement of world cinema, Sergei Parajanov's modernist landmark fuses folkloric traditions, animistic mysticism, and hallucinatory visual invention. Adapted from a 1911 novella by Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi, 'Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors' follows Ivanko (Ivan Mykolaichuk), a young Hutsul peasant who experiences both the depths of grief and glimmers of hope as he attempts to move beyond his first love, Marichka (an ethereal Larysa Kadochnykova). Steeped in the earthy atmosphere of the Carpathian Mountains, and featuring kinetic, radiantly colourful cinematography by Yuri Illienko and a collagelike experimental soundtrack, Parajanov's film is a singularly mythopoeic work of art.

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World-travelling National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid and Iowa housewife Francesca Johnson aren't looking to turn their lives upside down. Each is at a point in life where expectations are behind them. Yet four days after meeting, they won't want to lose the love they've found.

Academy Award winners Meryl Streep (earning her 10th Oscar nomination for this performance) and Clint Eastwood (who also produces and directs) bring blazing starpower and powerful conviction to the beloved characters of Robert James Waller's rhapsodic bestseller of love, choice and consequence. 'Streep and Eastwood are so visually and spiritually right they seem to have walked right off the page,' Entertainment Weekly proclaims. Also right are the small details and large emotions of once-in-a-lifetime love. With luck, a love like that happens to some of us sooner or later. For Robert and Francesca, it was later. And it was glorious.

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Skilfully interweaving intimate drama with some of the most breathtaking battle scenes ever brought to the screen, the film relays the triumphs, tragedies and romances that affect the lives of two aristocratic families at the time of Napoleon's tumultuous invasion of Russia.

Years in the making, with over 35,000 costumes and an astonishing 120,000 extras, 'War and Peace' - is a filmmaking Spectacle on a truly unrivalled scale.

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Two British parents living in the West Indies in the 1870s decide to send their children home to be schooled in England.

However, when their ship is attacked by pirates and the children are accidentally transferred onto the enemy vessel, their presence begins to stir up trouble amongst the superstitious crew. This is a thrilling adventure classic and a subtle, captivating look at the boundaries of childhood perception.

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Millionaire Jonathan Reynolds, Jr. (Charles Laughton) is dying. He tells his son Johnny (Robert Cummings) that he has just one wish - to meet the woman Johnny will marry.

When he can't get hold of his real fiancee, Johnny 'borrows' a pretty young hatcheck girl named Anne Terry (Deanna Durbin) for his father to meet in her place. Now fate takes a hand. Old Mr Reynolds' health starts to improve - and he's really taken a shine to his 'future daughter-in-law' Anne! He even throws a house party just so that Anne can sing for famous conductor Leopold Stokowski. How can Johnny and Anne tell the old man the truth? Will they have to follow through on their fake relationship - or can they stage a convincing break up?

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A group of German construction workers start a tough job at a remote site in the Bulgarian countryside.

The foreign land awakens the men's sense of adventure, but they are also confronted with their own prejudices and mistrust due to the language barrier and cultural differences with the native villagers. The foreman Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek) and the mysterious Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann) also start to fall out. The stage is quickly set for a showdown when the German workers begin to compete for recognition and favour from the local villagers.

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The provocative Italian filmmaker Elio Petri's most internationally acclaimed work is this remarkable visceral, Oscar-winning thriller.

Petri maintains a tricky balance between absurdity and realism in telling the Kafkaesque tale of a Roman police inspector (a commanding Gian Maria Volonte) investigating a heinous crime - which he himself committed. Both a compelling character study and a disturbing commentary on the draconian government crackdowns in Italy in the late 1960's and early '70s, Petri's kinetic portrait of surreal bureaucracy is a perversely pleasurable rendering of controlled chaos.

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The Friedmans are a respectable middle-class Long Island family, addicted to recording their daily lives - on super-8 in the early days, then later on videotape.

But their world crumbles when the father, a respected teacher, is accused - along with the youngest of his three sons - of molesting schoolchildren. Unbelievably, the arrest, trial and its horrifying aftermath are all chronicled in the family's own home movies, and the result is a remarkable tangle of contradictions that will haunt you long after the end-credits roll.

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Under the Nazi occupation of Holland, the Dutch people are forced to choose between collaboration and resistance.

Armed with the knowledge that those, choices made by fellow countrymen will forever changed the fate of their homeland, six college students set out on an epic adventure that will involve courage, betrayal and survival.

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After almost 40 years in Chicago, Donal (Alan Cumming) reluctantly returns to the Scottish Highlands to make amends with his estranged older brother, Sandy (Brian Cox), Sandy needs Donal to take over the family business - the Glen Nairn whisky distillery - and secure the family's legacy.

But Donal has another reason to return to the land of his birth. One he keeps hidden from his brother. While Donal struggles to deal with the memories of his youth and the trauma of his reason for his leaving, his devious actions in the present threaten the reconciliation so longed for by his older brother, Sandy.

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Regarded as the most popular of Laurel & Hardys feature-length films, not least for the Trail of the Lonesome Pine song, 'Way Out West' sees Stan and Ollie visiting the town of Brushwood Gulch to deliver the deed of a gold mine, only to be deceived by James Finlayson, playing a villainous

saloon-keeper. A great favourite among Laurel & Hardy admirers, Finlayson is featured elsewhere in this compilation through the classic L&H shorts 'One Good Turn' and 'Thicker Than Water'.
Episodes Comprise:
- Way Out West (b/w)
- Way Out West (colourised)
- One Good Turn (b/w)
- One Good Turn (colourised)
- Thicker Than Water (b/w)
- Thicker Than Water (colourised)

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Harmony Korine's debut feature is an audacious, lyrical evocation of America's rural underbelly, and an elegy in the southern-gothic tradition of William Faulkner and William Eggleston.

Shot in Korine's native Nashville - standing in for the tornado-ravaged Xenia, Ohio - the rough-hewn film follows two young friends, Tummler (Nick Sutton) and Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), as they ride around town, huffing glue and hunting stray cats, their every local encounter charged with vaudevillian anarchy as well as deep pathos. At once transgressive and empathetic, disturbing and undeniably beautiful, 'Gummo' is a one-of-a-kind portrait of angelic and devilish souls caught in a cultural void, circumscribed by poverty and the depleted, alienated spiritual life of late-twentieth-century America.