Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu
A star is born in a time of both celebration and instability in this historical drama with music from director Christophe Barratier. In the spring of 1936, Paris is in a state of uncertainty; while the rise of the Third Reich in Germany worries many, a leftist union-oriented candidate, Léon Blum, has been voted into power, and organized labor is feeling its new power by standing up to management.
In the year 60 B.C. a group of Druids, including the arch-druid Guttuart (Max von Sydow), witness the passing of a comet and interpret it as the sign of the coming of a king for their country Gaul, which has not had a king for a long time. Guttuart goes to Gergovia, the capital of the Arvenes tribe, to attend a meeting of Gallic tribal chieftains. The young boy Vercingetorix, along with his friend the young girl Eponia, sneak into a large cavern where Celtill, Vercingetorix's father and chieftain of the Arvenes, hosts the meeting of chieftains with the intention of proclaiming himself king of all Gauls. When Celtill shows off the crown once worn by the old kings of Gaul, an arrow from two Roman spies (dressed as Gauls) hits Celtill in the back.
Lucien is a young soldier in the French army during the First World War. Recently married and with a young daughter, his only aim is to get through the war unscathed and get back to his wife and daughter. But this world is turned upside down by a pair of trousers.
Nicolas, 13 years old, lives in a suburb north of Paris with his mother, a cleaning lady, and his older sister, a cashier in a supermarket. Left to his own devices, he and his friends have created a fearless gang that does not hesitate to travel to the capital to commit petty theft. The young boy, who attends a special education section, does not expect much from school. Everything changes with the arrival of a new teacher, who immediately seduces some of the students, including Nicolas, whom the young woman does not hesitate to welcome into her home to bring him up to speed. Nicolas makes lightning progress. But his momentum is broken by an event as painful as it is unexpected.
An abandoned caboose becomes a junkie's hideout, a multiple murder has been committed. A police investigation leads nowhere, the crime remains unsolved, and Marceau, a hardened cop, resigns in the aftermath. But his troubles don't end there: someone is stalking him and his life is in danger. To save himself, Marceau recruits Camille, a young woman drummed out of the police academy for her inability to fire a gun. They make a pact: Camille agrees to flush out Marceau's potential murderer and Marceau, in exchange, undertakes to remunerate and train her. Camille plunges into Marceau's seedy underworld and encounters a raft of suspects. As Camille sinks deeper and deeper into this sordid world, she comes to terms with its violence and understands that the line between good and evil is narrow indeed. From this insight she draws the strength that had previously eluded her. Marceau's legacy... But who, exactly, is Marceau?
What there is of a plot in this drama serves mainly as a vehicle for the exploration of character. In the story, Michel (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) is a recent widower. As the story opens, he and his friend Andre (Philippe Nahon) are sharing a drink on Christmas Eve. He takes a yellow scarf from a woman he knows (Laura Morante) and teasingly refuses to return it. Throughout the remainder of the film, the scarf reappears, as does the woman, until they wind up in bed together at the end of the film. Before that happens, Michel wanders around Paris, viewing the festivities with a jaundiced eye which serves to heighten the unattractiveness of those he observes. Later he has dinner with a group at Andre's house, and his poor opinion of human nature is amply supported by the events that occur then.
Set in the French countryside in the 1600s, a lone rider deposits a newborn baby boy on the steps of a monastery, having bitten his nose off. The child is bought up by an ex-pirate and his wife and is taught to read, write, count, joust and fence, and is also given a wooden nose. However, he is ordered by a local baron to attend a tough seminary, but he soon rebels and makes an action-packed escape...
The ex-gymnast and survival artist Emil falls in love with the prostitute Lissy. Through her he meets some criminals whom he can help thanks to his gymnastic skills. But on his rise in the criminal hierarchy, Lissy might fall by the wayside.
In the 1930's, Agaguk lives his traditional Inuit life. But one day, there is a murder in the tribe and Agaguk becomes a suspect. Soon he becomes persecuted by Henderson, a mean mountie, and he must flee through the cold winter of Northen Quebec.
A young Russian aristocrat, Baron Fyodor Jeremin, volunteers to serve with a Dragon squadron to impress the girl who rejected his love. Just at this time the 1863 insurrection explodes in Poland. He enlists to serve in the army being sent to suppress the revolt. He believes that now it's enough to defeat the Poles, become an officer and hero, get a bunch of medals, and then return and lay all of this at the feet of her beloved. However, the "little Polish war" looks completely different to the way that young Jeremin imagined it to be. In course of time, he learns to be on the wrong side. But there is no escape - he must kill or he will be killed. What's more, he falls in love with a beautiful Polish girl...
The year is 1943 and the place is Balandou, a small village in Guinea. The plot revolves around Adjutant Mariani, some kind of a misfit. Despised by his superiors, hated by his wife Marie-France, he represents colonial France while dreaming of Africa and its mysteries. When pro-independence Lanseye Kante, the new manager of the school, arrives in the village, turmoil arises.
Rex and Saskia are enjoying a biking holiday in France when, stopping at a gas station, Saskia disappears.
The story is of a young man, Stevens, who returns to his native village after a five year exile caused by a violent quarrel with his father. The story revolves around the women in Stevens life and the affects of his presence.
In the Médoc, a young woman is found drowned. An accident, her influential family of winegrowers maintains. Or rather murder, as the American inspector Morrison suspects. If so, why? What secrets this family keeps?
When a neo-Nazi group of terrorists is set to blow a pop concert off the face of the earth because it is an anti-racist benefit, they are faced with the intrepid Jean-Pierre Mougin (Richard Berry), a macho sports reporter with zero tolerance for Nazi hate crimes. Going along with Mougin to stop the bombing is Lyza (Fanny Bastien), whose brother was killed by this group of fascists, and so she is ardently seeking revenge. After Mougin gets his hands on a videotape that reveals the plot to blow up the concert and its audience, he and Lyza join forces. As the fuse gets shorter and shorter, Mougin is also joined by sympathetic street gangs. Thus reinforced, he faces his opposition (including crooked cops) in increasingly more desperate attempts to stop Murmeau (Jean Francoise Balmer), the leader of the Nazi gang, from carrying out his terrorist objective.
In this strange and beautiful crime drama, Bernard Giraudeau is Daniel Chetman, someone who wants to leave the life of violence he knew in his neighborhood -- and cannot do so because his nemesis, a strutting street gangster now involved with organized crime, continues to terrorize the inhabitants of Chetman's turf. After much spilled blood, a parade of ugly underground types, and various sexual scenes, Chetman reduces the forces of evil to a reasonable level of opposition -- but who knows if the neighborhood will be different in the end...
In this whimsical fable, Resnais deftly interweaves three story lines: the creation of an early-20th-century utopia; romantic high jinks at a school conference; and a fantasy sparked by F/X pioneer Georges Méliès.
Liberty Belle tells the story of a group of student's involvement with a group who oppose the French Algerian war. The film premiered at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.
Village of Artigat, southern France, summer 1542, during the reign of Francis I. Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols marry. A few years later, accused of having committed a robbery, Martin suddenly disappears. When, almost a decade later, a man arrives in Artigat claiming to be Martin, the Guerre family recognizes him as such; but doubts soon arise about his true identity.
French secret agent Joss Baumont is sent to kill the president Njala of an African country. However, a counter-order is given before he can execute his mission and he is abandoned in the hands of foreign authorities. He escapes and seeks revenge by pursuing what was his original mission.
The film follows four families, with different nationalities (French, German, Russian and American) but with the same passion for music, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The various story lines cross each other time and again in different places and times, with their own theme scores that evolve as time passes. The main event in the film is the Second World War, which throws the stories of the four musical families together and mixes their fates. Although all characters are fictional, many of them are loosely based on historical musical icons (Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, Glenn Miller, Rudolf Nureyev, etc.) The Boléro dance sequence at the end brings all the threads together.
Paris, France, 1942, during the Nazi occupation. Robert Klein, a successful art dealer who benefits from the misfortunes of those who are ruthlessly persecuted, discovers by chance that there is another Robert Klein, apparently a Jewish man; someone with whom he could be mistakenly identified, something dangerous in such harsh times.
A quiet and inconspicuous man rents an apartment in France where the previous tenant committed suicide, and begins to suspect his landlord and neighbors are trying to subtly change him into the last tenant so that he too will kill himself.
