humilityprim's - Rented List
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The Wages of Fear (1953)Le Salaire de la peur
Part road movie, part suspense thriller, the plot is high-tension simplicity itself. In the South American jungle, supplies of nitro-glycerine are urgently needed at a remote oil field. The unscrupulous American oil company pays four out-of-work men (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli and Peter Van Eyck) to deliver the supplies in two sets of drivers: a tension magnified thousand fold by the unforgiving heat, the lure of filthy lucre and the rough and rocky roads where the slightest jolt can result in agonising death. Which of the disparate, desperate desperadoes will survive the white-knuckle journey and claim the loot and the glory? - Director:
- Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Cast:
- Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck
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Aloys (2015)We Are (Dead)
Aloys Adorn is a middle-aged private detective who lives and works with his father. He experiences life from a safe distance, through a video camera he keeps recording 24 hours a day, and the massive collection of surveillance tapes he organises and obsessively watches at home. But when his father dies, Aloys is left on his own and his sheltered existence begins to fall apart. After a night of heavy drinking, Aloys wakes up on a public bus to find that his camera and precious observation tapes have been stolen. Soon after, a mysterious woman calls to blackmail him. She offers to return the tapes if Aloys will try an obscure Japanese invention called telephone walking with her, using his imagination as their only connection. As he is drawn deeper and deeper, falling in love with the voice on the other end of the phone, the woman opens up a new universe that may allow Aloys to break out of his isolation and into the real world. - Director:
- Tobias Nölle
- Cast:
- Georg Friedrich, Maja Stolle, Tilde von Overbeck
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Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)Hiroshima, My Love
A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, passionate affair in post war Hiroshima. Their deeply intense connection brings out scarred but fading memories of love and suffering, which Resnais communicates with the use of flashback techniques innovative to the time. - Director:
- Alain Resnais
- Cast:
- Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas
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An ex-con, a corrupt cop, a reformed alcoholic, a wrestler, a sharpshooter and a pair of inside men: these seven men intent on executing the perfect robbery and taking a racetrack for two million dollars. But this is the world of film noir, a tough, sour place where nothing quite goes as planned... For his third feature Stanley Kubrick adapted Lionel White's 'Clean Break' with a little help from hard-boiled specialist Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me), and in doing so created a heist movie classic, one to rank alongside John Huston's 'The Asphalt Jungle' and Quentin Tarantino's 'Reservoir Dogs'. The robbery itself is one of cinema's great set-pieces, as taut a piece of filmmaking as you'll ever find, expertly controlled by Kubrick, who called 'The Killing' his first mature work . Starring Sterling Hayden, perennial fall guy Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor as his duplicitous wife, 'The Killing' is quintessential film noir, still as brutal, thrilling and audacious as it was almost six decades ago. - Director:
- Stanley Kubrick
- Cast:
- Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards
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Elle (2016)Oh!
From legendary filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, 'Elle' is a gripping psychological noir thriller. Starring iconic actress Isabelle Huppert in a career-defining role, 'Elle' follows Michele LeBlanc (Huppert), founder and CEO of a successful video game company, who is attacked in her own home. Upending our expectations, Michele begins to track down her assailant, and soon they are both drawn into a curious and thrilling game, one that at any moment may spiral out of control. - Director:
- Paul Verhoeven
- Cast:
- Isabelle Huppert, Oury Milshtein, Laurent Lafitte
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Head of the Boss (1975)Shin jingi naki tatakai: Kumicho no kubi
1968. Gangland strife in Northern Kyushu follows family troubles within the Owada gang when boss Owada (Ko Nishimura) takes in wanderer and assassin Shuji Kuroda (Bunta Sugawara) after he does time for the assassination of a rival boss. Rejecting his drug-addicted son-in-law Kusunoki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), much to the anguish of his conflicted daughter Misako (Meiko Kaji, Female Prisoner Scorpion), Owada sets up his own demise when rogue elements within his gang notice the unrest. Kuroda, promised a payment for his jail time, also targets the new Owada boss with a ruthless vengeance, and recklessly lays waste to the local crime elements in order to achieve his financial rewards. Director Kinji Fukasaku takes his popular series in a new, original direction with this standalone film, and introduces a fresh style and method of storytelling to the yakuza genre, including a pair of female characters who are just as calculating and ruthless as their male counterparts. - Director:
- Kinji Fukasaku
- Cast:
- Seizô Fukumoto, Yuriko Hishimi, Meiko Kaji
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A Touch of Zen (1971)Xia Nu
An unambitious painter named Gu (Shihjun) lives with his mother in the vicinity of an abandoned mansion rumoured to be haunted. In actuality, the mansion has become a hiding place for the warrior Yang (Hsu Feng) and her own mother, both taking refuge following the assassination of their loyal minister father by the wicked eunuch Wei of East Chamber. After the eunuch sends an army to pursue the escapees, the group fortify the mansion with traps and false intimations of the terrifying ghosts within. But even after, things take yet more unsettling turns...