john-t's - Rented List

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The Little Tramp punches in and wigs out inside a factory where gizmos like an employee feeding machine may someday make the lunch hour last just 15 minutes.

Bounced into the ranks of the unemployed, he teams with a street waif (Paulette Goddard) to pursue bliss and a paycheck, finding misadventures as a roller-skating night watchman, a singing waiter whose hilarious song is gibberish, a jailbird and more. In the end, as tramp and waif walk arm in arm into an insecure future we know they've found neither bliss nor a paycheck but, more importantly, each other. The times and satire remain timeless in 'Modern Times'.

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After 109 years of waiting, Great Britain finally clinched its greatest ever sporting achievement - a debut victory in the Tour de France - with a poise and collective domination by its number one squad, Team Sky, rarely, if ever, matched in the race's hallowed annals.

Mutton-chopped Londoner Bradley Wiggins, 32, and his blue-clad Sky troops brushed aside everything the Tour could throw at him: brutal first week crashes, relentless media pressure, hooligans sabotaging the roads with nails and flares, mammoth time trials and infernal Alpine and Pyrenean mountain stages. Not to mention the threat of treason from within the ranks of Sky itself...Acclaimed as Britain's greatest ever sportsman, Wiggins victory was far from the only highlight of the 2012 Tour. 2012 was the year, too, that Colorado's Tejay Van Garderen, fifth overall and Best Young Rider champion, became America's new Tour de France hero, and outshone teammate and 2011 Tour winner Cadel Evans. 2012 was the year that triple stage winner Peter Sagan, just 22 but already predicted a future Tour champion, kept the green points jersey out of Sky's clutches - a herculean task. 2012 was the year, too, that World Champion's Mark Cavendish's fourth straight victory on the Champs Elysees saw the Briton - finally - crowned the Tour's top all time sprinter, bringing down the curtain on a Tour packed with the greatest of historic sporting breakthroughs.

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Visionary director J.J. Abrams brings to life the motion picture event of a generation. As Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and the sinister First Order rise from the ashes of the Empire, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is missing when the galaxy needs him most.

It's up to Rey (Daisy Ridley), a desert scavenger and Finn (John Boyega), a defecting stormtrooper, to join forces with Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) in a desperate search for the one hope of restoring peace to the galaxy.

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Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling) is planning a party to celebrate her 45th wedding anniversary. One week before the celebration, however, a letter arrives for her husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay), containing news that reawakens troubling and long-hidden memories.

Though Kate continues to prepare for the anniversary, she becomes increasingly concerned by Geoff's preoccupation with the letter and the ensuing revelations about his past. By the time the party comes round, there may not be a marriage left to celebrate.

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From Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon, it's the tail end of the psychedelic '60s and paranoia is running the day from the desert to the sea of sunny Southern California.

With a cast of characters that includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, the FBI, LAPD detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, a group of Beverly Hills dentists and a mysterious entity called The Golden Fang, everything's gone from "groovy" to "where you at, man?" in what seems like a matter of moments. So when private eye Doc Sportello's ex-old lady Shasta Fay shows up at his door with a story about her current billionaire land-developer boyfriend and his wife and her boyfriend...well it all starts to get a little peculiar after that. Maybe you'll just want to see the movie?

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Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), is tricked by her boyfriend into delivering a briefcase where she is grabbed and held hostage by the merciless Mr. Jang (Choi Min-Sik). His thugs surgically implant a package loaded with a powerful synthetic substance in her to smuggle it across the border.

The package leaks and she develops superhuman traits. Lucy enlists the help of professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), whose decades of research on the brain's potential makes him unparalleled in the field and the only person with the ability to see where this might lead. Relentlessly pursued by her former captors Lucy begins to turn the tables and transform into a warrior evolved beyond human logic.

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When Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) witnesses the arrival of alien ships from a distant world, an incredible series of events begins- planes which disappeared during the Second World War are found intact in Mexico, long lost ships mysteriously re-appear in the middle of the desert and people from all

around the world, including Neary are convinced that someone is trying to communicate with them. Nearys search to find an answer leads him to take part in the ultimate encounter with the extra-Terrestrials and to board the vast, beautiful Mothership.

Witness the founder of Apple like never before. 'Steve Jobs' paints an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at the epicenter of the digital revolution, backstage in the final minutes before three iconic product launches.

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Jo (Rita Tushingham) is an awkward, shy 17-year-old girl living with her promiscuous alcoholic mother, Helen (Dora Bryan) in the grey, bleak, tenement houses of Manchester.

Desperately longing to simply be loved, when her mother's latest boyfriend drives Jo out of their apartment she spends the night with a black sailor on a brief shore leave. When Jo's mother abandons her to move in with her latest lover, Jo finds a job and a room for herself. Then Geoffrey (Murray Melvin) drifts into her world, a shy and lonely homosexual, with whom she agrees to share her flat. When Jo discovers that she is pregnant with the sailor's child, Geoffrey, Grateful for her friendship, looks after her, even offering marriage. But their brief taste of happiness is short-lived for Jo's fickle and domineering mother wants to be part of the picture.

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Four exceptional astronomers celebrate 50 years of work and friendship on a road trip in the south-western United States, recapturing youthful adventures and recounting each other's influences on the most exciting period in astronomy's history: Donald Lynden-Bell the theoretician, Nick Woolf the

visionary, Roger Griffin the inventor, and Wallace Sargent the observer. Together they represent the most productive period astronomy has ever had. They helped build the world's biggest observatories and made revolutionary discoveries about the evolving universe. Featuring breathtaking landscapes and astonishing night sky footage, 'Star Man' is an intimate portrait of friendship and the discoveries that have the power to change the way humanity sees itself.

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A revealing portrait of this most self-effacing photographer emerges through conversation, anecdote and candid reflection. In the almost six decades that Jane Bown (b 1925) worked for the Observer newspaper, she became renowned for insightful, highly individualistic portraits of the famous.

Some of these portraits are now regarded as classics of the genre - Samuel Beckett, Queen Elizabeth, the Beatles. This feature documentary is a beautiful portrait of Jane Bown, her quiet determination to succeed in an almost exclusively male world, and her legendary no-nonsense working method. It includes interviews with Rankin, Nobby Clark, Edna O'Brien and Don McCullin and her many iconic photographs of the great and the good of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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"Expresso Bongo" takes the lid off the seedier side of showbiz! Cliff Richard plays Bongo Herbert, a young singer, playing for peanuts in Soho's sleazy clubs with its striptease snows, clip joints and teenage dens.

He becomes an overnight success when taken up by wide boy showbiz agent Johnny (a brilliant performance from Laurence Harvey) but at what price? Cliff's first role is packed with punch and the great soundtrack includes the hit single Voice in the Wilderness and I've Never had It So Good. His co-stars include Yolande Donlan, as man-crazy American singer Dixie Collins and Sylvia Syms cast against type as a dancer in a strip show.

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Perhaps his most famous film, La Dolce Vita slices into the decadent amoral core of Roman society with Fellini's trademark attention to detail and spectacular photography.

Marcello Mastroianni plays a gossip columnist (the term 'paparazzi' derives from the in a film) who aspires to be a more serious writer but knows he never will be, because like society, he is fascinated by the decadent hedonist pursuits which are seemingly everywhere. The Vatican was appalled by the film, but the public adored it, relishing the images Fellini fed them, most notably the now infamous scene of Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg frolicking in the Trevi Fountain.

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Eager to shift thoughts away from the Troubles during the 1970s, music fanatic Terri Hooley (Richard Dormer) opens a record store, 'Good Vibrations', in the heart of one of Belfast's roughest districts.

As the shop gains a loyal following, Terri starts a small record label with the aim of launching some of the local bands, including The Undertones whose first single, 'Teenage Kicks', is championed by legendary Radio 1 DJ John Peel...

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Anyone who lived through the '80's experienced the magic of 'Gremlins'. For everyone else, now is the time to see one of the decade's defining movies, a wildly original blend of comedy and horror.

When Billy (Zach Galligan) receives an adorable, mysterious pet named Gizmo for Christmas, he's given three rules for its care. Inadvertently, he breaks the rules, and a resulting army of duplicate furballs wreaks havoc throughout the town...