Bored with the limited and tedious nature of provincial life in 19th-century France, the fierce and sensual Emma Bovary finds herself in calamitous debt and pursues scandalous sexual liaisons with absolute abandon. However, when her volatile lifestyle catches up to her, the lives of everyone around...
Prof. Henri Laborit uses the stories of the lives of three people to discuss behaviorist theories of survival, combat, rewards and punishment, and anxiety. René is a technical manager at a textile factory and must face the anxiety caused by corporate downsizing. Janine is a self-educated...
In eighteenth-century France, a girl is forced against her will to take vows as a nun. Three mothers superior treat her in radically different ways, ranging from maternal concern, to sadistic persecution, to lesbian desire.
A man helps the victim of an auto accident, not realizing that the man has actually been shot. The men who shot him are now after the man who helped him, in order to eliminate him as a potential witness. Soon they are killing everyone he even comes in contact with in order to get him.
Marceau Léonetti, a competent and energetic officer stops by chance the son of an influential lawyer driving under the influence of alcohol. A few months later, the lawyer falsely accuses Léonetti as being violent and incompetent. As a result Marceau is transferred to a small police station,...
The intertwined lives of two women in 1970s France, set against the progress of the women's movement in which Agnes Varda was involved. Pomme and Suzanne meet when Pomme helps Suzanne obtain an abortion after a third pregnancy which she cannot afford. They lose contact but meet again ten years...
A farce, Hoskins plays a photographer who specializes in religious pictures who searches for a model for Jesus. He does a favor for a friend and finds himself doing a voice track for a porno movie with Natasha Richardson. Hoskins finds his model for Jesus in Jeff Goldblum and a romantic triangle...
In 1945, as World War Two comes to a close, five small time crooks unite to form a gang. After several bold robberies they become notorious as "the front-wheel drive gang". The police attempt to stop their crime spree with little success, but how long will their luck last?
Cardinal Mazarin dies, leaving a power vacuum in which the young Louis asserts his intention to govern as well as rule. Mazarin's fiscal advisor, Colbert, warns against Fouquet, the Superintendant who has been systematically looting the treasury and wants to be prime minister. Fouquet believes...
At 45, divorced, unemployed and father of two children, Franois Morot realizes that he can no longer support the society in which he lives and decides to leave everything.
In order to escape her isolation, wheelchair-bound Christine makes a life changing journey to Lourdes, the iconic site of pilgrimage in the Pyrenees Mountains.
All of Europe was affected by the Great Depression of the 1930s, but some parts were hurt less badly than others. France, for instance, was relatively prosperous. In this grim drama, a sturdy Polish boxer and his family have settled into a mining town in northern France because that's where the...
Dominican friar Etienne de Bourbon visits a 13th-century French village in search of heretics for the Inquisition. Despite the opposition of the local priest and the indifference of the villagers, he finds a seemingly perfect suspect: a young woman who lives in a forest outside the village and...
The lucky Baron wins a boat in a card game and takes off with his former lover to find new adventures. Adverse circumstances land them in a small town, where the Baron's seafaring companion leaves for more attractive scenery offered by a wealthy local man. Meanwhile, there is a certain charming...
22 year-old- Yan is trying hard to find his way in life: a job he likes, an ideal. In Saint-Nazaire, his home town, he vegetates, just like his father, an unambitious worker. His fiancée, Juliette, has middle class values and dreams of nothing but a comfortable married life. Dissatisfied, he moves...
A middle-aged disabled man unknowingly begins a lonely hearts correspondence with his own unmarried sister, who takes care of him. As he writes more and more to her, he begins to fall in love, and she, knowing that it is her brother who is writing, discovers a new, tender side to him. But trouble...
The painful life of a mentally unstable but highly gifted woman is unveiled in this film, based on episodes from the life of an actual person. Aloise (Delphine Seyrig) creates a series of haunting drawings while she is incarcerated in an institution for the insane in turn-of-the-century...
Jean, nicknamed Brasse-Bouillon, and his brother Ferdinand live with their paternal grandmother, who is responsible for their upbringing. But when their parents returned from Japan, they settled in Belle-Angerie and resumed their role with the children, while their grandmother had to leave for...
