paul-b's - Rented List

Show moreShow less

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.

Show moreShow less

Forced to live by his wits in order to survive, Zain's life in Beirut reaches a turning point when his parents make an unforgiveable deal that will see his younger sister (Haita 'Cedra' Izzam) married off.

Left distraught by this terrible turn of event he takes to the road and whilst looking for work at a fairground, befriends a young woman who is working as a cleaner and helps to look after her adorable baby Jonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole). Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) and Jonas form a touching bond but things are about to get much more complicated when a set of circumstances force Zain to make choices that will have huge ramifications. 'Capernaum' is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit - a battle cry for the forgotten, the unwanted and the lost that offers hope in the most unexpected of places.

Show moreShow less

Against a dramatic nineteenth-century backdrop of radical Italian Nationalism Luchino Visconti's masterful epic, 'The Leopard', follows the Sicilian Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) and his family as they adjust to the social turbulence of revolutionary times.

Adapted from Tomasi di Lampedusa's esteemed novel of the same name, this is a tragicomic depiction of a class eclipsed by history. ..

Show moreShow less

A young married couple documents their descent down the rabbit hole as they seek to fulfil one of their darkest desires: kill a stranger and film it for posterity. Strain and second thoughts pull at their devotion to each other as they carefully plot out a heinous crime for the sake of curiosity.

While they may have carefully thought out every small step and detail of getting away with murder, nothing can prepare them for the guilt and the weight of moving on in the aftermath.

Show moreShow less

Pauline (Annalynne McCord) is a frumpy teenage misfit, both at home and at school. Bullied by her peers, she escapes into a bizarre and vivid fantasy world full of bloody mayhem, horrifying amateur surgery and perverse sexual thrills.

Delusional and desperate for attention from her disapproving and uptight mother (Traci Lords), Pauline's attempts to gain admiration escalate to a truly disturbing finale.

Show moreShow less

In Hungary during World War II, Vendel Morosgovanyi (Csaba Czene) indulges his outlandish sexual fantasies while stationed at an isolated military outpost.

Decades later, his illegitimate child Kalman Balatony (Gergely Trocsanyi) has become a professional speed-eater who dreams of consuming his way to fame and fortune. Instead, he grows old and immobile, cared for by his son Lajoska Balatony (Marc Bischoff), a taxidermist determined to leave behind a great work of art when he dies. 'Taxidermia' blends body horror, black comedy and astonishing aesthetic beauty to paint a fascinating portrait of Hungary from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

Show moreShow less

Struggling in the shadow of his famous comedian father (world-renowned entertainer Jerry Lewis), a young comic (Oliver Platt) retreats to his hometown when his act bombs in Las Vegas.

Searching for a new comedy routine, he uncovers some not-so-funny secrets about his family - and discovers their own eccentricities may be just the material he's looking for.

Show moreShow less

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.

An ageing' friar and his young apprentice investigate a series of mysterious deaths at a monastery. The pair must race against time to prove the innocence of an unjustly accused man while avoiding the wrath of a Holy Inquisitor.

Show moreShow less

Jean (Jean Gabin), a deserter, arrives in Le Havre and looks for a shelter before leaving the French territory. Housed in a shed on the harbour, at the end of the docks, he meets an eccentric painter and a mysterious and beautiful girl called Nelly (Michèle Morgan)...

From then on he will be trapped in a tragic destiny, in spite of his passion for Nelly and his will to live...

Show moreShow less

Across the course of history, only a relative handful of filmmakers can be said to have developed and refined a language of cinematographic expression which, inimitable, belongs to its creator alone.

Pedro Costa, of our time, exists within this select group, and Colossal Youth is one of his sublime achievements.
An intimate epic wherein present and past move as one, Colossal Youth chronicles Ventura, the towering Cape Verdean who has assumed the role of surrogate "father" to an untold number of characters around Lisbon and its now-razed neighbourhood of Fontainhas. Through Ventura's ghost-like visitations to figures such as Vanda Duarte (the central personage of Costa's previous In Vanda's Room) and repeated recollections of his past life as a newly migrated manual labourer, Costa explores the nature, and necessity, of storytelling in the course of the human adventure.

Show moreShow less

Finally released in 1946, ten years after it was shot, Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne was hailed as an 'unfinished masterpiece'. Since then, his masterly adaptation on a Maupassant story has grown in reputation to the point where it has become Renoir's best-loved film.

On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl leaves her family and fiancé for a while, and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. Shot on location on the banks of two small tributaries of the Seine, Renoir's sensuous tribute to the countryside - and to the river - has seldom been surpassed. In its bitter-sweet lyricism, its tenderness and poetic feel for nature, its tolerant satire of bourgeois conventions and its poignant sense of the transience of innocence and love, 'Partie De Campagne' seems to distil the essence of all that is most personal of Renoir's art.

Show moreShow less

Desperate to free herself from a loveless marriage, an Israeli woman named Viviane Amsalem files for divorce from her cruel and manipulative husband. But Israeli law and its Rabbinical court dictates that a divorce can only be granted under the husband's consent.

Determined to obtain her dignity and freedom Viviane finds herself fighting an epic and deeply dramatic psychological battle against a profoundly absurd legal system and her cold and calculating estranged husband.

Show moreShow less

Sidney Trebor (Gregoire Colin) cuts an enigmatic figure; an emotionally distant man who prefers the company of his dogs. His contact with other people is limited to an affair with a local pharmacist (Bambou) and a wordless attraction to a beautiful and equally aloof dog breeder (Beatrice Dalle).

An ailing heart forces Trebor have a black-market transplant. He recovers and travels to the bustling shipyards of Pusan in Korea, buys a boat and voyages south to his former home on a remote island near Tahiti. Here, he searches for the lost son he fathered years before. However he is uncertain of the welcome he will receive after all these years.

Show moreShow less

When Babette (Stéphane Audran), a beautiful and mysterious French refugee, arrives in a remote Danish town the tight-knit, puritanical community begrudgingly let her in, providing her with shelter and work.

But after the town patriarch passes away and Babette insists on preparing a feast in his honor, a magical world of sensory revelations is thrown open to the villagers, changing their lives forever...