mpb's - Rented List

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In this Vincente Minnelli-directed backstager, Fred Astaire dazzles in numbers set in a train station (By Myself), a penny arcade, a backlot Central Park and a smoky cafe, the latter two with the incomparable Cyd Charisse.

And when he, Nanette Fabray and Jack Buchanan play infants who "hate each other very much!" in the merry Triplets, it's one more reason to love this movie very, very much. As the hallmark song which originated here goes, That's Entertainment!

Herbert Ponting's official record of Captain Scott's legendary expedition to the South Pole, restored by the BFI and featuring a new musical score by Simon Fisher Turner, captures in breathtaking detail the alien beauty of the landscape, and ensured that the heroism involved would never be forgotten.

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A tyrant schoolteacher - Delasalle (Paul Meurisse) in a seedy boarding school has both his wife (Vera Clouzot) and his mistress (Simone Signoret) looking for a way out as he maltreats them both. They decide to work together to murder their tormentor.

The two women drown Delasalle in the bath then dump the body in a swimming pool. When the pool is drained and no body found they start to worry. When his suit is returned, cleaned, they start to panic. Is he alive? Does someone else know? A spiral of perfectly crafted tension hurtles you to an unparalleled conclusion and an ending you will never forget!

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Meet a dewy-eyed ingenue, a gee-whiz tenor, stuck-up stars, hard-up producers, brassy blondes and "shady ladies from the 80s". They're all denizens of '42nd Street', belting out ageless Harry Warren/Al Dubin songs and tapping out Busby Berkeley's sensational Depression - lifting production numbers.

The put-on-a-show plot spins merrily, full of snappy banter and new faces Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell and Ginger Rogers. The show-stopping numbers (Shuffle off to Buffalo, You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me and the title tune) still dazzle. Looking and sounding its best in years via this new digital transfer from the restored original camera negative and optical audio tracks, '42nd Street' shows good times never go out of style.

The Cook serves up gourmet masterpieces in a beautiful restaurant. The thief holds his tyrannical court in the restaurant, terrorising all around him. His wife has a dangerous and illicit passion. Her lover is having the riskiest affair of his life.

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A middle-class schoolteacher, stuck in a government-enforced teaching post in an arid backwater, stops off in the mining town of Bundanyabba on his way home for the Christmas holidays.

Discovering a local gambling craze that may grant him the financial independence to move back to Sydney for good, the opportunity proves irresistible. But the bad decisions are just beginning and a reliance on local standards of hospitality in "the Yabba" may take him on a path darker than ever expected.

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The Exiles chronicles one night in the lives of a group of young American Indians living in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles.

Based entirely on interviews with the participants and their friends, the film follows this group of exiles -transplants from Southwest reservations - as they flirt, drink, party, fight, and dance. With its vivid, high-contrast blade and white photography, and soundtrack by The Revels, Kent Mackenzie's gritty, frills-free depiction of this marginalised Los Angeles community draws comparisons to John Cassavetes, Charles Burnett and Vittorio De Seta.

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Inspired by the gambling episode in the ancient Hindu epic the 'Mahabharata', this rare classic of silent cinema tells of two kings who share a passion for reckless gambling, and for the same women.

After the beautiful Sunita (Seeta Devi) nurses Ranjit (Charu Roy) back to health following dramatic events during a royal tiger hunt, his wicked rival Sohat (Himansu Rai) persuades him to risk his kingdom and his love in a fateful game of dice. 'A Throw of Dice' is the third film in a pioneering trilogy of silent films made through a unique partnership between German director Franz Osten and Indian actor-producer Himansu Rai, whose films combined documentary techniques with narratives derived from Indian myths and legends. The film is presented here with a new full orchestral score by musician, producer and composer Nitin Sawhney, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Sawhney's distinctive compositional style, steeped in both western and South Asian musical traditions, results in an evocative, lyrical soundtrack to this sumptuous film.

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When Oskar Matzerath (the extraordinary David Bennent, just twelve at the time) receives a tin drum for his third birthday, he vows to stop growing there and then - and woe betide anyone who tries to take his beloved drum away from him, as he has a banshee shriek that can shatter glass.

As a result, he retains a permanent child's-eye perspective on the rise of Nazism as experienced through petit-bourgeois life in his native Danzig, the 'free city' claimed by both Germany and Poland whose invasion in 1939 helped kick-start World War II. With the help of Luis Bunuel's favourite screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, director Volker Schlondorff turns Gunter Grass's magical-realist masterpiece into a carnivalesque frenzy of bizarre, grotesque yet unnervingly compelling images as Oskar turns his increasingly jaded eye and caustic tongue on the insane follies of the adult world that he refuses to join.

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This smash hit futuristic comedy is a fresh and sublimely entertaining tale from French filmmakers, Jeunet (Amelie) and Caro. In a starving, post-holocaust France, a butcher keeps his customers supplied by his cannibalistic tendencies.

But when his daughter falls in love with a circus performer, only an underground band of vegetarian freedom fighters can save her beloved from the meat cleaver.

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Adrift in the Depression-era Southwest, Clyde Barrow(Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) embark on a life of crime. They mean no harm. They crave adventure - and each other. Soon we start to love them too. But nothing in film history has prepared us for the cascading violence to follow.

Bonnie And Clyde turns brutal. We learn they can be hurt - and dread they can be killed.

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L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) takes on a blackmail case...and follows a trail peopled with murderers, pornographers, nightclub rogues, the spoiled rich and more.

But Raymond Chandler's legendary gumshoe solves it in hard-boiled style - and style is what 'The Big Sleep' is all about.

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Linklater's breakout second film is an utterly unique series of loosely interweaved episodes shining a delightfully off-beat light on a parade of socially disconnected, overly educated, and barely motivated citizens in Austin Texas.

In coffeehouses, clubs, bars, apartments, stores, and streets of the college town, life's strange quirks, odd foibles and disruptive inanities come astonishingly to life. Linklater's film remains a cult sensation that launched a thousand imitators. But none of the effusive 20-somethings littering the casts of 1990s US independent cinema can hold a candle to those of this hilarious and vibrant true original.

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Few films have caused such controversy as Peter Watkins' The War Game, a drama documentary made for BBC TV in 1965 about a "limited" nuclear attack on Kent, England.

Blending fiction and fact to create a moving and startling vision of the personal as well as the public consequences of such an attack, Watkins exposes the inadequacy of the nation's Civil Defence programme and questions the philosophy of the nuclear deterrent. Conspicuously absent from TV screens until 1985, it was mainly through cinema release in 1966 - and its Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967 - that it gained a loyal and vociferous following, providing a sharp focus for CND and other peace movements.

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Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an ambitious journalist, is determined to win a Pulitzer Prize by solving a murder committed in a lunatic asylum and witnessed only by three inmates, from whom the police have been unable to extract the information.

With the connivance of a psychiatrist, and the reluctant help of his girlfriend, he succeeds in having himself declared insane and sent to the asylum. There he slowly tracks down and interviews the witnesses - but things are stranger than they seem...