Having just returned the disc--City Of God--I had out since December 2006 (!) I am now in a regular cycle of DVD rentals from Netflix once more. I upgraded my rental program to get out of the 2-DVDs-per-month limit and to enable unlimited streaming rentals. The latter is a huge advantage now that the iPad is equipped to play these films!
So no more keeping one film out for three-and-a-half years (at $5 membership fees per month, I could have bought the DVD of that flick many times over!).