mpb's - Rented List

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To the enigmatic question "Who are Seconds?", the film's original poster responded: "The answer is almost too terrifying for words.... The story of a man who buys for himself a totally new life. A man who lives the age-old dream - If only I could live my life all over again.

" John Frankenheimer directs Rock Hudson as a "second": that is, the newly plastic-surgery altered "reboot" of, in this instance, a listless banker named Arthur Hamilton. Such procedures are carried out by a secret organization known only as "The Company," with the promise of giving an individual a chance at making a fresh start at life... but at what cost? Master lighting cameraman James Wong Howe provides the paranoiac atmosphere to the skewed reality of what came to be widely considered one of Frankenheimer's very best films.

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Planned by the Soviet Central Committee to coincide with the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the unsuccessful 1905 Russian Revolution, this film was developed by the 27 year-old Sergei Eisenstein from less than one page of script from a planned eight-part epic that was intended to

chronicle a large number of revolutionary actions. Starting with the Potemkin's crew's refusal to eat maggot-infested meat, the mutiny develops and their leader Vakulinchuk is shot by a senior officer. The officers are overthrown and when the Potemkin docks at Odessa, crowds appear from all directions to take up the cause of the dead sailor and open rebellion ensues. What became the most celebrated sequence in world cinema history follows as the Czarist soldiers fire on the crowds thronging down the Odessa steps; the broad newsreel-like sequences being inter-cut with close-ups of harrowing details. Returning to sea, the Potemkin's crew prepares the guns for action as the ship, flying the flag of freedom, steams to confront the squadron. When they finally meet their worst fears are allayed as, with relief coupled with joy, they are universally acclaimed. This film, which was destined to become such an influential landmark in cinematographic history, opened in Moscow in January 1926. It ran for only four weeks.

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"The Wrong Man" is like and unlike any other Alfred Hitchcock movie. The story packs tension, the images are spellbinding and the dilemma genuinely frightening. But this time the master of suspense dramatizes the harrowing true experiences of a man tried for crimes committed by a lookalike robber.

Henry Fonda plays musician Manny Balestrero, a man full of visible but unspoken rage at his wrongful arrest. Vera Miles is his distraught wife Rose, driven to madness by the ordeal. And the right man to bring the unsettling facts of the case to vivid screen life with documentary precision is Hitchcock. He made New York City a star of the film and cast real-life Balestrero case witnesses in small roles. He shot in many actual locations, among them the Stork Club, Manny's jail cell and Rose's sanitarium.

Sixty-year-old Huw Morgan looks back on his life as a boy (Roddy McDowall) in a small Welsh mining town. His reminiscences reveal the disintegration of the closely knit Morgans, and his devoted parents (Donald Crisp, Sara Allgood), while capturing the sentiments and issues of their time.

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Overcoming considerable challenges, Herzog captures the stunning majesty of the Chauvet Cave in southern France, where the world's oldest cave paintings have been discovered. Herzog reveals a breathtaking subterranean world including the 32,000-year-old artworks.

With his humorous and engaging narration Herzog reflects on our primal desire to communicate and represent the world around us, evolution and our place within it, and ultimately what it means to be human.

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Iquitos, Peru, is a town Isolated in the middle of the jungle at the turn of the century. On the outskirts, a few shacks are rotting in the mud. In the centre are the splendid houses of the nouveaux-riches rubber barons.

It is in this setting, rich in grotesque contrast, that Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald - Fltzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski), as the natives call him - has his dream of bringing together Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt for one great celebration of Grand Opera. To finance his fantastic dream, Fitzcarraldo decides to exploit a vast area of rubber trees growing beyond the impassable Ucayala Falls. In order to circumvent this barrier, he literally has his huge steamboat lifted over a mountain from one branch of the river to the other. With the aid of a tribe of Indians bewitched by records featuring the voice of the greatest singer of all time, Fitzcarraldo fights fever, mosquitoes and suffocating heat to achieve the impossible.

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He (Brando) is a 45 year old American living in Paris, haunted by his wife's suicide. She (Maria Schneider) is a 20-year-old Parisian beauty engaged to a young filmmaker.

Though nameless to each other, these tortured souls come together to satisfy their sexual cravings in an apartment as bare as their dark, tragic lives. Caught up in the frenzied beat of a carnal dance they cannot seem to stop, these unlikely lovers take their passion to erotic heights - and depths - beyond anything they could ever have imagined.

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Take two legendary co-stars, a rip-roaring boys own story, a fearless director and an eventful location shoot in Zaire and Uganda and you get 'The African Queen' - the best loved of all adventure movies.

During World War One, a hard drinking river trader (Humphrey Bogart) and a prim missionary (Katharine Hepburn) are forced to take a hazardous river expedition together, encountering tropical hazards, nefarious German officers and a surprising romance.

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Daniel Craig returns one last time as James Bond, starring alongside Oscar winner Rami Malek in 'No Time To Die'. Bond has left active service and is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica. His peace is short-lived when his old friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) from the CIA turns up asking for help.

The mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist turns out to be far more treacherous than expected, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.

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'Aparajito' sees Apu (Smaran Ghosal / Pinaki Sengupta) move with his family to the busy city of Benares, where they hope to build a new life after suffering a devastating family tragedy.

But when Apu's father then dies, the young man decides to head out on his own and attend college in Calcutta, leading to a growing estrangement between himself and his widowed mother.

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Errol Flynn shot to stardom as Peter Blood, a 17th-century physician turned pirate after escaping unjust political imprisonment. It was a role the handsome, sea-loving Tasmanian was born to play, and he shaped it into Hollywood's archetypal image of the adventurous hero.

That he also became a romantic idol and a vision of gallantry in love is due in large part to his ideally cast co-star: radiant Olivia de Havilland in the first of their eight films together.

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Drawn from his own family memories, 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' is a strikingly intimate portrait of working class life in 1940's and 1950's Liverpool.

Focusing on the real-life experiences of his mother, sisters and brother whose lives are thwarted by their brutal, sadistic father (a chilling performance by Pete Postlethwaite), the film shows us beauty and terror in equal measure. Davies uses the traditional family gatherings of births, marriages and deaths to paint a lyrical portrait of family life - of love, grief, and the highs and lows of being human, a 'poetry of the everyday' that is at once deeply autobiographical and universally resonant.

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After the success of 'Easy Rider', its star and co-creator Peter Fonda was given the green light to shoot the movie of his choice. The result was 'The Hired Hand', an elegiac western that stands firmly as a classic of modern American cinema.

Chasing their dream of a better life, Harry (Fonda) and his good friends Arch (Warren Oates) have drifted across the plains of America together. However, Harry has grown tired of his transient existence and decided to return to the wife and the child that he left years before. At first, refusing to accept him back, his wife orders him to sleep in the barn and work the farm, strictly as a hired hand. Soon their romance rekindles, and they rediscover the happiness they had lost. But as bad news of Archie reaches Harry, he is forced to make the most costly choice of his life.

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After a round of partying he can't remember, World War II veteran Dave Hirsh is placed on a bus headed for the last place he'd choose: Parkman, Indiana, the hometown Hirsh hasn't seen in well over a decade.

Frank Sinatra plays Hirsh, whose arrival in Parkman brings small-town hypocrisy to the unforgiving light of day in this character-driven tale directed by Vincente Minnelli and based on a novel by James Jones. In his first screen pairing with Sinatra, Dean Martin, plays a sharp-witted cardsharp.

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Featuring Marilyn Monroe's legendary rendition of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend", this fun musical comedy is a knockout. Marilyn and Jane Russell star as two showgirls who set sail on a luxury liner bound for France.

Hijinks on the high seas ensue as Lorelei (Monroe) and Dorothy (Russell) discover they're being tailed by a private detective hired by the father of Lorelei's landlocked boyfriend. By the time the ship reaches Paris, a missing diamond tiara lands the girls in hot water, but by following their hearts, they'll get out of trouble and on to the altar.