john-t's - Rented List

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In this thrilling, climactic chapter of the Planet of the Apes saga, Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his apes are forced into a deadly conflict with an army of humans led by a ruthless Colonel (Woody Harrelson).

But after suffering unimaginable losses, Caesar resolves to 'avenge his kind, pitting him against the Colonel for a final showdown that will determine the future of the planet!

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In 1961, Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent), a 60 year old taxi driver, stole Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. It was the first (and remains the only) theft in the Gallery's history.

Kempton sent ransom notes saying that he would return the painting on condition that the government invested more in care for the elderly - he had long campaigned for pensioners to receive free television. What happened next became the stuff of legend. Only 50 years later did the full story emerge - Kempton had spun a web of lies. The only truth was that he was a good man, determined to change the world and save his marriage - how and why he used the Duke to achieve that is a wonderfully uplifting tale.

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A burned-out New York City paramedic working the graveyard shift in Hell's Kitchen, Frank Piere (Nicolas Cage), is haunted by visions of the people he was unable to save.

Over three typically chaotic nights with three different partners Larry (John Goodman) , Marcus (Ving Rhames), and Walls (Tom Sizemore), Frank's desperate search for redemption only drives him closed to madness!

When Jane (Sally Hawkins) is dumped at the altar, she has a breakdown and spirals into a chaotic world where love (both real and imagined) and family relationships collide with both touching and humorous consequences.

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From Oscar-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso), 'Ennio' celebrates the life and legacy of the legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who passed away on 6 July 2020.

Through interviews with directors, screenwriters, musicians, songwriters, critics and collaborators, Tornatore's documentary retraces the life and works of the cinema's most popular and prolific 20th century composer - who wrote over 500 scores for film and television and sold over 70 million records - from his cinema debut with Sergio Leone, to winning an Academy Award for 'The Hateful Eight' in 2016.

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With the imminent arrival of the Queen, Britannia Hospital couldn't be any less prepared. With striking workers only allowing patients near to death into the hospital, the kitchen staff refusing to prepare food until union leaders are bought off with promises of O.B.E.

's, and the head surgeon conducting, with public funds, expensive, deranged experiments, like inventing a modern Dr. Frankenstein - there is nothing short of anarchy! With Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) hot on their heels as the undercover investigative TV reporter catching all this bedlam on film, this energetic black comedy is a very bleak insight into the wrongs of modern Westernised culture.

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Made under the Franco regime, Victor Erice's astonishing 1973 feature debut is quite simply one of the most remarkable, influential and purely poignant films to emerge from the 1970's. A bona-fide classic of European cinema, the film brought Erice instant and widespread acclaim.

An audacious critique of the disastrous legacy of the Spanish Civil War, 'The Spirit of the Beehive' is set in a rural 1940's Spanish village haunted by betrayal and regret. Following a travelling cinema's screening of James Whale's Frankenstein, seven year-old Ana (the mesmerising Ana Torrent, later to grow into an international star of some standing) becomes fascinated with Boris Karloff's monster. Obsessed with meeting the initially gentle creation, she transfers her entrancement to tending a wounded army deserter. Atmospherically rendered by legendary Director of Photography Luis Cuadrado, it's impeccably performed by both Torrent and veteran actor Fernando Fernan Gomez in the role of her emotionally scarred, bee-keeping father. Existing in a highly evocative dreamlike state, it's a powerfully symbolic, richly allegorical tale that is as unique as it is beautiful.

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In rural Sweden around the turn of the century, three sisters reside in a vast manor house with their housekeeper. Agnes (Harriet Andersson) lives out the last days of her life in pain, hoping for companionship and affection.

Surrounded by her sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), Agnes takes comfort in the fact that her remaining time can be spent with those close to her. However, dissatisfaction in their day-to-day-lives, and the estrangement that they feel from one another, causes the sisters to become increasingly self-absorbed.

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Malcolm McDowell provides the original idea for and stars as wide-eyed innocent (not for long) Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson's epic comedy 'O Lucky Man!'. Armed with ambition and a work ethic, coffee salesman Mick hits the road and finds that desire alone can't bring wealth and status.

He meets rich and poor alike...and finds cunning and cruelty across the social spectrum. Ralph Richardson, Helen Mirren, Arthur Lowe, Rachel Roberts, Mona Washbourne and other stars in multiple roles knit Mick's picaresque adventures together. And commenting with wit and irony is Alan Price, providing a memorable song score. Once you meet Mick, you're the lucky one.

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Shot in the summer of 1975 as General Franco lay dying, Saura's masterpiece takes its title from a sinister Spanish proverb: 'Raise ravens and they'll pluck out your eyes'.

A subtle yet unmistakable indictment of the family as a repressive force in Spanish society, 'Cria cuervos' centres on an eight-year-old orphan (the spellbinding Ana Torrent) who believes herself to have poisoned her cold, authoritarian father (Hector Alterio), a high-ranking military man whom she blames for the death of her adored mother (Geraldine Chaplin).

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Julie Christie plays the part of 'Darling' in this story of a stylish amoral model. There are three men in her life, each of whom willingly or involuntarily helps her on her way to the top.

Dirk Bogarde plays a TV interviewer, an honest man striving to tell illusion from reality; Laurence Harvey, an advertising executive, totally cynical about manipulating society's values; and Roland Curram, a gay magazine photographer battening parasitically on glossy society. There is also a 'fourth man' - the one whom Darling marries, only to find herself a prisoner of the smart world she has conquered. Although Darling thinks she can exploit society to her own advantage, she ends up exploited - manipulated by men who are, aptly enough, professional image-makers at a time in British life when the image said it all (or so it was thought). And at the centre of it all, incarnating the decade which saw the ascension of the model girl to the status of international idol, Julie Christie gives the sort of indelible performance that made many of her subsequent roles look like Darling's distant cousins or historical ancestors.

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This monumental mid-nineteenth-century epic from Jan Troell charts, over the course of two films, a Swedish farming family's voyage to America and their efforts to put down roots in this beautiful but forbidding new world.

Movie legends Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann give remarkably authentic performances as Karl Oskar and Kristina, a couple who meet with one physical and emotional trial after another on their arduous journey. The precise, minute detail with which Troell depicts their story - which is also that of countless other people who sought better lives across the Atlantic - is a wonder to behold. Engrossing at every step of the way, the duo of 'The Emigrants' and 'The New Land' makes for perhaps the greatest screen drama about the settling of America.

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1902: John McCabe (Warren Beatty) turns up in a northwest mining town called Presbyterian Church, starts gambling and sets up a successful brothel with his girlfriend Constance Miller (Julie Christie), an opium-addicted madam.

They refuse an offer from the mine operators to buy them out, but the mine bosses refuse to take no for an answer.

Ashby's film follows the burgeoning relationship between the gloomy, 20-year-old, suicide-staging Harold (Bud Cort), suffocated by his wealthy homestead, and the sprightly octogenarian Maude (Ruth Gordon), whose bohemian wiles and open-arms approach to living enable Harold's first gentle steps towards embracing existence.

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Karamakate, a warrior shaman and last of his tribe, transcends the worlds of men and seeks truth through their dreams. He alone knows how to find the mysterious and psychedelic Yakruna plant; for some it has life-saving properties, for others it is a commodity waiting to be exploited.

Two scientists, in two different times enlist Karamakate on their individual quests in an epic adventure into the heart of the Colombian Amazon to find this mythical plant. This Oscar nominated film is seen through Karamakates eyes and bears witness to the effects of colonialism, religion and the exploitation of rubber on indigenous traditions and the environment to which they arc inextricably linked.