New to Rent By Mail for August 28 2024

CHOPPER (2001)

Eric Bana (Troy, Munich) gives an incredible performance as real-life convict and author Mark "Chopper" Read in the twisted and savagely funny Chopper. The son of a devoutly religious mother, Chopper dreams of making a name for himself as a legendary figure of infamy. But the wisecracking, would-be criminal mastermind turns out to be a criminal failure who gets tossed in a maximum-security prison. Bowed but unbroken, Chopper manages to twist his life around with a fascinating and wickedly funny retelling…and the press and the public can't get enough! (BLU-RAY)

LOADED GUNS (1975) 

Action movie maestro Fernando Di Leo (Caliber 9) directs another wildly entertaining crime film with Loaded Guns (Colpo in canna), starring the incomparable Ursula Andress (Dr. No, Casino Royale). Andress plays Nora, a stewardess who finds herself in the center of a gang war in Naples. If anyone can undermine an ancient mob blood feud and come out on top, it’s the effortlessly clever, sexy and downright devious Nora, played with verve by the stunning Andress. More of an action-comedy than the gritty cop films Di Leo was known for, Loaded Guns shows that Di Leo was more than a one-trick pony. (BLU-RAY)

CUTTING CLASS (1989)

High school can be murder. Just ask Paula (Jill Schoelen, The Stepfather). Her overprotective father disappears during a weekend hunting trip. She’s being romantically pursued by Brian Woods (Donovan Leitch, The Blob), a creepy classmate who recently graduated from a mental institution. Her jealous jock boyfriend Dwight (Brad Pitt, Moneyball) is looking for any reason to release his juvenile rage. The lecherous school principle Mr. Dante (Roddy McDowall, Fright Night) is after her tight student body, and her friends and teachers are rapidly falling victim to a silent, shadowy mass-murder. As the body count rises, Paula begins to suspect that any one of her reckless suitors could be the twisted killer. But unless she learns his identity soon, her high school education will quickly come to a nasty end. (BLU-RAY + 4KULTRAHD)

IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT (1973)

Directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate), Impossible Object (also released as Story of a Love Story) is a surreal drama starring Alan Bates (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Secret Friends), Michel Auclair (The Day of the Jackal), Dominique Sanda (The Conformist), and Lea Massari (L'avventura).

Harry (Bates), a British writer living in France with his wife and children begins an affair with Natalie (Sanda), who herself is unhappily married to Georges (Auclair). However, Harry is unable to untangle the facts of his life from the fictions which he creates, and the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred.

Adapted by Nicholas Mosley (Accident) from his Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, photographed by Claude Renoir (Barbarella), and scored by Michel Legrand (Eve), Impossible Object is a long-overlooked classic of seventies European cinema. (BLU-RAY)

LONE STAR (1996) (Criterion Collection)

A keen observer of America’s social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neowestern mystery. When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. Sayles’s masterful film—novelistic in its intricacy and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast, including Joe Morton, Elizabeth Peña, and Kris Kristofferson—quietly subverts national mythmaking and lays bare the fault lines of life at the border. (BLU-RAY + 4KULTRAHD)