Daniel Mesguich
Following a fall during mistletoe picking, Druid Getafix decides that it is time to secure the future of the village. Accompanied by Asterix and Obelix, he undertakes to travel the Gallic world in search of a talented young druid to transmit the Secret of the Magic Potion.
In a series of long interviews, 12 prime ministers talk about their experience in the upper echelons of power. The function of prime minister, torn between the president and the parliament, appointed without necessarily being elected but responsible for everything, is at the center of debate. With the exception of Jacques Chirac (1974-1976 and 1986-1988), deliberately left out because of his image as French President, those who governed France for the past 35 years agreed to discuss the exercise of power, as seen through archive footage, but also how they experienced it personally. Filmed in the same studio and sitting in the same chair, 12 French prime ministers talk freely about their time in office, from their appointment until their resignation.
Adolphe 'Dolfo' Rashevski travels to Israel with grandson Ric, but his brother, orthodox rabbi Samuel 'Shmouel, refuses to come attend their fellow Auschwitz survivor sister Rosa's funeral. Back in their home, the whole well-integrated family and their 'gojim' (non-Jewish and would-be) partners regularly wrestle with the meaning of Jewish blood, traditions and religion. For one it seems the way to gain a wife, for others the bomb under or the obstacle for a marriage. Yet love tends to conquer all but death.
In Peter Hyams's adaptation of the famous Alexander Dumas story The Three Musketeers, the young D'Artagnan seeks to join the legendary musketeer brigade and avenge his father's death - but he finds that the musketeers have been disbanded.
Iranian Iradj Azimi directed this French historical drama re-creating events depicted in the famous 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa by Jean Louis Andre Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). The ill-fated voyage of the frigate Medusa begins when it departs Rochefort for Senegal in 1816. After striking a sandbar off the African coast, 150 civilians row safely to shore, but Captain Chaumareys (Jean Yanne) orders 140 soldiers and sailors onto a raft (minus supplies) and has it cut loose. Only 14 survive from the 140, creating a scandal back in France. Gericault (Laurent Terzieff) later talks to three of the survivors while researching his painting. Work on this film began in 1987, but sets destroyed by Hurricane Hugo caused delays, so the film was not completed until 1990. However, it then remained undistributed until an incident in which writer-director Azimi slashed his wrists in front of French Ministry of Culture officials.
Edward is an editor in a small English publishing house. The story concerns what happens when he receives a very good manuscript from Nicholas, an old friend, who up until now has been a hack writer. The manuscript sheds light on events both men lived through, and Edward comes to the conviction that it reveals that it was Nicholas who raped the woman Edward loved, and that he is therefore responsible for her subsequent suicide. Very carefully, he plots his revenge.
On 9 January 1836, Pierre Lacenaire goes to the guillotine, a murderer and a thief. He gives Allard, a police inspector, his life story, written while awaiting execution. He also asks Allard to care for Hermine, a lass to whom he has been guardian for more than ten years. In flashbacks, from the prison as Lacenaire writes, from Allard's study as he and Hermine read, and from other readers' memory after the book is published, we see Lacenaire's childhood as he stands up to bullies, including priests, his youthful thieving, his first murder, his brief army career, his seduction of a princess, and his affair with Avril, a young man who dies beside him.
Last days of queen Marie Antoinette stunningly portrayed by a director who's clearly done a massive historical research. An accurate plot and a very moving rendering.
A movie about the volatile marriage between artist Nils Dardel and Thora Klinckowström.
A sultry French boarding school for girls, in the early twenties. The young pupil Lucienne evades but returns with a weird police inspector who should protect her. Against what or whom? Solange, the psychic unstable gym teacher? Or the voyeuristic principal Madame de Challens? Or other girls?
Claire's handbag is stolen. It contained a letter written ten years previously by the man who is now the French President. In the letter he urges his pregnant mistress to have an abortion. Claire immediately alerts the President's men. From that moment, the machinery of state swings into action.
Walter is told by his boss, Sara, to deliver an urgent letter to Henri de Corinthe. On the way he finds a beautiful woman he had been eying in a nightclub, lying in the road, bound up. He takes her to a villa to get a doctor, and ends up being locked in a bedroom with her. While she is making love to him, he has visions of surrealistic images from René Magritte's paintings. In the morning, the girl, Marie-Ange, has vanished, the villa looks derelict, and his neck is bleeding. Was it all just a nightmare?
In the 1930s a young fellow, Simon Chalumet, is sent to a military school by his overbearing father, an ex-soldier who has little sympathy for his son's more gentle temperament, or for his interest in films.
The scene is the restless Paris of the interwar years where an attractive and ambitious woman successfully makes her way in a world previously reserved for men: that of high finance. Originating from a humble background, she quickly becomes popular with small savers by offering them outstanding interest rates. Extremely popular, she makes no secret of her taste for the good things in life and her homosexual affairs. They will cost her dearly...
Having both suffered extreme losses, a man and a woman try to form a relationship.
Beginning with "The 400 Blows," director Francois Truffaut made a series of films about the impetuous Antoine Doinel, in which this is the last. Antoine is now 30, working as a proofreader and getting divorced from his his wife. It being the first "no-fault" divorce in France, a media circus erupts, dredging up Antoine's past. Indecisive about his new love with a store clerk, he impulsively takes off with an old flame.
French diplomat Dominique Auphal is put under surveillance by an unnamed secret service. They wish to find a weakness in his life in order to control him politically. Auphal becomes "File no. 51": his private life is spied, analysed and commented.
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin is raised by his father and his grandfather because his mother dies when he's still very little. He works as a handyman, studies the law at a university and travels the country as an actor before he becomes the celebrated playwright Molière who impresses firstly the Duke of Orleans and then even King Louis XIV.
