French Cinema

Marguerite Duras is one of the most widely read French novelists today. She had a celebrated love affair with Yann, her much younger muse and apprentice. The film also offers an insight into the heart and mind of one of the world's literary figures.

Jour de fête: In this enchanting debut feature, Jacques Tati stars as a fussbudget of a postman who is thrown for a loop when a traveling fair comes to his village.

Two cousins by marriage, each married to other people, meet at a wedding. They become friends and eventually fall in love.

Fate and coincidence, doomed love, and storybook romance surface throughout the French director's films, many of which are further united by the intersecting lives of characters who either appear or are referenced across titles.

France de Meurs, a seemingly unflappable superstar TV journalist whose career, home life, and psychological stability are shaken after she carelessly drives into a young delivery man on a busy Paris street. This accident triggers a series of self-reckonings, as well as a strange romance that proves impossible to shake. A film that teases at redemption while refusing to grant absolution, France is tragicomic and deliciously ambivalent a very 21st-century treatment of the difficulty of maintaining identity in a corrosive culture.

Irene is with her elderly paramour, on the Riviera, to celebrate her birthday. When he falls asleep on her, she decides to slip down to the hotel bar. There, she mistakes barman Jean for a wealthy guest. He encourages the deceit by taking her up to the Royal Suite for the night. The following year, the same thing happens. This time her lover finds out and disowns her. Knowing Jean is a barman of little means doesn't stop her from wanting to be with him. Jean soon finds himself in Irene's shoes with an older and worldly-wise Madeleine. Even though they both have paramours, the two keep in increasingly close touch.

Luis is happily single, enjoys his job, and is pampered by his mother and sisters. All that changes when his family decides he should get married. Luis hatches a plot to avoid their plans: he'll hire the "perfect" woman to stand him up at the altar.

An irreverent, uplifting comedy about friendship, trust, and human possibility. Based on a true story of friendship between a handicapped millionaire and his street-smart ex-con caretaker, The Intouchables depicts an unlikely camaraderie rooted in honesty and humor between two individuals who, on the surface, would seem to have nothing in common.

Story of friendship between two artists and their love for the same woman.

Alex is a romantic for hire. If your daughter or sister or friend is falling for the wrong man, Alex will get her to fall for him, watch her dump the loser, and then break her heart by walking away. She'll be sad but wiser and lucky to have avoided a bad relationship. It's a highly profitable business with one rule: don't fall in love. When Alex is hired to woo Juliette, he breaks her heart, and his own rule.

It is about Xavier, an economics graduate student studying for a year in Barcelona, Spain as part of the Erasmus programme, where he encounters and learns from a group of students who hail from all over Western Europe. It is part of a trilogy of films centered around the character of Xavier and his progression from student to family man and friends he initially encounters in a student share-house in Spain.

A gender-bending farce about the owner of a drag-revue nightclub, his high-strung transvestite "companion," and a wedding that defies all odds.

Don Salluste profite de ses fonctions de ministre des Finances du roi d'Espagne pour raqueter le peuple. Mais la Reine qui le déteste réussit à le chasser de la cour. Ivre de vengeance, il décide de la compromettre. Son neveu Don César ayant refusé de se mêler du complot, c'est finalement le valet de Don Salluste, Blaze, transi d'amour pour la souveraine, qui tiendra le rôle du Prince charmant. Malheureusement à force de quiproquos, il ne parvient qu'à s'attirer les faveurs de la peu avenante Dona Juana.

Cloaked in a comedy of manners, this scathing critique of corrupt French society is about a weekend hunting party at which amorous escapades abound among the aristocratic guests, which are also mirrored by the activities of the servants downstairs.

A man is convinced he met an enigmatic woman the previous year at the same location, and perhaps had a flirtation. A second man, possibly the woman's lover or husband, repeatedly intimidates the first man. Their relations unfold through flashback shards that never quite fit into place, their lives a hall of mirrors that never reveal a true self.

A comedy about two families with opposing lifestyles, who discover their children were switched at birth.

It is summer, and thirty-year-old Antoine is forced to leave the city to return to his family in Provençe. His father is sick, so he must assume the lifestyle he thought he had shed: driving the family grocery cart from hamlet to hamlet, delivering supplies to the few remaining inhabitants. Accompanied by Claire, a friend from Paris whom he has a secret crush on, Antoine gradually warms up to his experience in the country and his encounters with the villagers, who initially seem stubborn and gruff, but ultimately prove to be funny and endearing.

Marcel Marx, an old bohemian living in the French harbor city of Le Havre, stands up for a young African refugee when officials begin to pursue the boy for deportation.

On Capri, an Italian crew makes a German film of Homer's Odyssey; Fritz Lang directs with American money. Prokosch, the producer, with his sneer and red Alfa, holds art films in contempt and hires writer Javal to help Lang commercialize the picture. Against this backdrop, Javal's marriage to Camille, a young former typist, disintegrates. It opens with the couple talking in bed, she asking assurance that he finds her attractive. Later that day he introduces her to Prokosch, and, unawares, blunders unforgivably. The rest of the film portrays her, in their apartment and in public, expressing her hurt and change of heart and his slow grasp of the source of her contempt.

The Misanthrope is a searching comic study of falsity, shallowness, and self-righteousness through the character of Alceste, a man whose conscience and sincerity are too rigorous for his time.

French drama set in the 1950s following a young woman who yearns for more than the humdrum existence she seems destined for. As a 21-year-old, Rose Pamphyle (Déborah François) is kept firmly in check by her father. He has arranged her engagement to a local mechanic and the girl seems destined to pass from the control of one man to another on her wedding day. However, when Rose travels to Lisieux in Normandy another opportunity presents itself. Though her interview for a secretarial job goes disastrously, she makes the acquaintance of a charismatic manager called Louis Echard (Romain Duris). Impressed by her natural abilities at the keyboard, Louis appoints himself her trainer for a speed typing competition. Can Rose type her way to the life she desires?

France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Héloïse's first moments of freedom. Héloïse's portrait soon becomes a collaborative act of and a testament to their love.

An African college professor flees his country for France and seeks political asylum while falling in love with a Frenchwoman.

The story of an aged widow's discovery of simple pleasures and personal fulfillment after a life of toil and conventional domestic responsibilities.

The rich bourgeois Orgon has become a bigot and prude. The title character, a wily opportunist and swindler, affects sanctity and gains complete ascendancy over Orgon, who not only attempts to turn over his fortune but offers his daughter in marriage to his "spiritual" guide.

Geneviève, 17, lives with her widow mother, who owns an umbrella shop in Cherbourg. A tender love story, unique in its presentation - sung throughout.

Offbeat homage to Hollywood musicals finds a stripper rousing her lover's jealousy by seducing his best friend.

Pierre Levasseur is an important CEO who is photographed with his lover, Elena, a world-famous model. In an attempt to salvage his marriage, he tries to convince his wife that Elena is not his lover, but that of François Pignon, the porter who was passing by and ended up on the photograph. To make his story believable, Levasseur convinces Pignon and Elena to move in together and to pretend to be a couple. Things get more complicated when this creates tensions between Pignon and his former flatmate Richard and his love interest Émilie. Ultimately, Levasseur's wife discovers the truth and decides to play games with her husband.

A wacky medieval knight and his faithful servant are suddenly transported into the present day. They begin an all-out comic assault on their former castle-- now a luxury hotel-- in their quest to return to the past.

In a fictional African country, a rich, self-made businessman and member of the post-colonial ruling elite takes on a third wife to show the world his wealth, only to be stricken by a curse resulting in impotency. His efforts at getting cured lead to disastrous yet comical results.