Laura Rossellini, a widow from Rome, vacations on the Algarve coast one hot summer. One day while sunbathing, she finds a wounded man named Robert drifting in the surf on a rubber raft. She takes him home, and, after he is revived, learns his story. As they talk, their mutual attraction grows,...
In the midst of WW I, a doctor and a lawyer team up to turn a ramshackle old mountain chateau into a sanatorium/health spa that caters to the afflicted from most every stratum of European society, most of whom show up with false hope in their hearts and plenty of equally false identities. Even the...
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...
A brief extract of four kids' lives somewhere in France. Quentin, who won a writers contest and now pays more attention to his career as an author than to his friends, beautiful Julie, his girl-friend, much more mature than she looks, falling in love with Quentin's very best friend Jimmy, who is...
Mina is a movie buff with a husband, Georges, who's out of work, and a 15-year-old son, Tommy. While Mina works part-time as a domestic for Claire Daboval, the family is terribly short on money, so when Georges is offered construction work on a massive bridge project, he immediately accepts, even...
Every Saturday, to the great despair of his wife, Emmanuel finds his daughter Elise, fruit of a first union. A demanding and excessive father in his passions, he went to lay a loving trap for Elise.
Julien is an electronics professional who is down on his luck when he decides to enter an international sailboat race. He is led astray from his original good intentions by a low-life press agent who convinces him it would be well worth his while to win the race by illegal maneuvering. As he sets...
Olivier, the nine-year-old son of Elisabeth and Serge, a country veterinarian, vanishes one afternoon on the way to his grandmother's house. The emotional aftermath of his disappearance sends his father packing and nearly destroys his mother.
In this political drama, five left-leaning friends gradually lose heart in the Socialist government elected in 1981 in France. One of the five men is a television broadcaster; the others are a teacher about to become an academic inspector, a tax man, the director of a cultural center, and a...
A famous rock singer is being overtaken. Vox, the album and live producer of the singer, prepares a real revolution with the help of a scientist. With holography, they would like to create the perfect copy of the star.
This French tale, set in the 17th century, chronicles the marriage between an errant knight and a beautiful spinster. The tale begins in 1629, and the knight is Nathan Le Cerf who joins the regiments of Count Anchire after he loses his entire family to the plague. Nathan's first assignment is to...
A taxi driving, strip club managing conman chooses a salesman as a mark. The latter falls for his hospitality, but soon appears to be already in trouble.
A sensitivity to sounds coming from the activities of an unwelcome guest in the close quarters of an apartment is only one important component in this atmospheric, avant-garde drollery by Chantal Akerman. When the apartment owner comes home, her guest is settled in and at first, the slightly...
Elisa and Eric are two teenage war orphans. They change their apartment on the outskirts of the city into a photo-studio to make a living, and they are very devoted to it. The two seem to live like heavenly beings without connecting to the outside world. Their only contact with the exterior is...
In this comedy drama, two lovers go on vacation to the fellow's summer home in southern France. Once there, the woman becomes quite jealous because she knows that many women have been at this house with him. She herself is not as experienced as he and secretly dreams of having many different...
