New to Rent By Mail for January 7 2025

CHALLENGERS (2023)

From visionary filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach and a force of nature who makes no apologies for her game on and off the court. Married to a champion on a losing streak (Mike Faist – West Side Story), Tashi's strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against the washed-up Patrick (Josh O'Connor – The Crown) – his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend. As their pasts and presents collide, and tensions run high, Tashi must ask herself, what will it cost to win. (BLU-RAY)

CIVIL WAR (2024)

From filmmaker Alex Garland comes a journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House. (BLU-RAY)

UNINVITED GUEST OF THE STAR FERRY (1984)

In the town of Seroa, a Korean immigrant’s store has flourishing business and the natives get jealous. In order to buy out the store, they sell their goods at a lower price. One day, Lee Sang-kuk, who manages the restaurant his parents and sister Na-young left behind, is gunned down by a sniper. Han Sung-min starts to investigate Sang-kuk’s murder. (BLU-RAY)

BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER (2022) 

Director Nina Menkes compels the casual moviegoer and cinephile alike to confront how the visual language of cinema is used to disempower women at the most fundamental level.

Using more than 175 film clips from canonical Hollywood favourites and cult classics as well as interviews with filmmakers and scholars, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power reveals a sinister framework of misogyny and paternalism that, from early cinema to the present day, infiltrates some of our favourite movies.

Featuring interviews with leading actors, directors and film theorists, the film is a mesmerising visual journey through cinema’s sexist bloodstream that will forever change the way you see films. (DVD)

THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT'S A RESURRECTION (2019)

With a poet’s eye for place, light, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday existence, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese crafts a meditation on the concept of homeland and a transcendent elegy for what is lost in the name of progress. Grieving and alone following the deaths of her husband and children, elderly Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo, in a soul-shaking end-of-life performance) prepares for her own death and to be buried alongside her ancestors. When plans for a new dam near her village in the landlocked kingdom of Lesotho threaten to literally wash away all she holds dear, Mantoa takes a last stand, mobilizing her neighbors to fight for their land and their way of life. The experience of watching Mosese’s visionary, much-lauded This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is as timeless and elemental as the land itself. (DVD)