mpb's - Rented List

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13-year-old Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud) can't seem to do anything right. His dysfunctional parents yell at him, his spiteful schoolteacher picks on him and luck just never goes his way.

Despite his efforts at patience, one day it all becomes too much and Antoine throws in the towel, choosing to take his chances on the Paris streets. At times joyous and at others bitterly hard, his new life brings a newfound freedom - one that Antoine will follow up to its painful, poignant and beautiful conclusion...

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'Bicycle Thieves' tells the story of Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani), a long unemployed man who finally finds employment putting up cinema posters for which he needs a bicycle.

His wife pawns all the family linen to redeem their already pawned bicycle and for Antonio salvation has come, until it is stolen. Antonio and his son take to the streets in a desperate search to find the bicycle which is so crucial to his livelihood.

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Having learned the ways of the world being brought up in a brothel, street hustler Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) has earned his name through his legendary sexual prowess, cementing his reputation night after night to an audience of hopheads and hipsters hungry for spectacle.

One night on a routine cover-up job with two crooked cops, Sweetback watches a young black man get beaten within an inch of his life and decides to fight back. His action set in motion a journey through the dark heart of 1970s urban America still writhing in the flames of the race riots, encountering motorcycle gangs, back power militants, fascist public officials and a torrent of insatiable women every step of the way.

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Recent widower Shigeharu Aoyama is advised by his son to find a new wife, so he seeks the advice of a colleague having been out of the dating scene for many years. They take advantage of their position in a film company by staging an audition to find the perfect woman.

Interviewing a series of women, Shigeharu becomes enchanted by Asami, a quiet, 24-year-old woman, who is immediately responsive to his charms. But soon things take a very dark and twisted turn as we find that Asami isn't what she seems to be...

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In 16th century Japan a poor village is raided every year by a group of bandits until, driven to the brink of starvation, the villagers decide to hire professional warriors to protect them. With only three meager meals a day to offer as payment, their request seems an impossible one.

A simple plot, flawlessly executed - 'Seven Samurai' combines comedy, pathos, memorable characters, gripping tension and some of the finest action scenes ever filmed.

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Hotter than Bond. Cooler than Bullitt, movie posters proclaimed. John Shaft was indeed a shut-your-mouth detective to reckon with, a fact emphasized from the film's start by Isaac Hayes Academy Award-winning Best Original Song and Oscar-nominated score.

Richard Roundtree plays the smart, tough confident lead, a private investigator whose hunt for a kidnapped woman puts him in the middle of feuding syndicates. Gordon Parks directs from a screenplay that Ernest Tidyman co-scripted from his own novel. John Shaft is an icon of change from an era of change. Today, Shaft still tells it like it is.

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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.

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Single mother Alice (Emily Beecham) is a dedicated plant breeder at a corporation engaged in developing new species.

She has engineered a very special flower, remarkable not only for its beauty but also for its therapeutic value: if kept at the ideal temperature, fed properly and spoken to regularly, it makes its owner happy. Alice takes one home as a gift for her teenage son, Joe. They name it 'Little Joe' but as it grows, so too does Alice's suspicion that her new creations may not be as harmless as their nickname suggests.

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Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a young, black optometrist whose adoptive parents have recently died. Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) is a sad, unmarried mother who works in a factory and lives in a shabby terraced house with her confrontational daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook).

Cynthia's brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) is a successful wedding photographer who lives comfortably in suburbia with his snooty wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). In a misplaced effort to re-unite the family, Maurice and Monica throw a small barbecue party for Roxanne's 21st birthday. When Cynthia brings along her new friend Hortense, chaos ensues as some painful truths are revealed.

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An uncompromising, double-Bafta winning portrait of a particular milieu of working-class family life in southeast London, where its writer and director grew up, 'Nil by Mouth' is a powerful, astute, authentically foul-mouthed account of unfettered machismo, booze and drugs, petty crime and domestic

abuse. The performances are mesmerising throughout, with Ray Winstone as the volatile and self-pitying Ray, Kathy Burke as his longsuffering wife Val and Charlie Creed-Miles as her junkie brother Billy. Shot and scripted in a deceptively casual realist style reminiscent of John Cassavetes, this profoundly personal and humane film eschews sensationalism and sentimentality to illuminate a vicious circle of abuse and criminality. A dark but dazzling masterwork.

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Karl Verloc (Oskar Homolka), manager of a London cinema, is secretly involved with a gang of European saboteurs who are plotting a massive bomb attack in Piccadilly Circus.

With the police already suspicious of Verloc, they place an undercover detective on his trail - can he bring the saboteurs to justice before they perpetrate their outrage on London?

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Set in Japan during World War II, the film focuses on Seita and his little sister Setsuko. After their mother is killed in an air raid, and with their father serving in the navy, they are forced to fight for survival in the devastated Japanese countryside.

Food and shelter are scarce, and even their own relatives are too concerned with their own survival. All they have is each other and their belief that life must carry on.

Aquaman reveals the origin story of half-human half-Atlantean Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) and takes him on the journey of his lifetime - to discover if he is worthy of who he was born to be...a king.

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Starring Academy Award winners Charlize Theron, and Nicole Kidman and Academy Award nominees John Lithgow and Margot Robbie.

Based on the real scandal, 'Bombshell' is a revealing look inside the most powerful and controversial media empire of all time; and the explosive story of the women who brought down the infamous man who created it.

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Hailed as one of the best comedies ever made and nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture, the story focuses on army surgeons who develop a lunatic life-style in order to handle every day horrors encountered in Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean war.

Though highly skilled and deeply dedicated, this irreverent mob of madcaps is equally adept at making a shambles of army bureaucracy.