French Cinema: A-K

In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new astringency. Transposing a Tolstoy novella to contemporary Paris, L'argent follows a counterfeit bill as it originates in a schoolboy prank, then circulates like a virus among the corrupt and the virtuous alike before landing with a young truck driver, leading him to incarceration and violence

Follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of man. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.

An enchanting countryside comedy about the marital woes of a sweetly deluded baker whose wife has run off wirth a shepherd. Because the baker is upset and cannot bring himself to work, the scandal snowballs and engulfs the entire town.

A law student is attracted to a girl he sees in the street and wanders the area hoping to see her again. While there, he stops in for cookies at a quaint Paris bakery and becomes interested in a pretty brunette who works there. Is he truly interested or is she just a sweet diversion?

Two bumbling burglars plan a robbery with a young woman they just met. Problems begin immediately when they both fall for the girl and the plan goes haywire. The jewel-heist plot is merely a jumping off point for Godard's fast-paced mix of fantasy and spoof of Hollywood crime films.

Dramatized adaptation of the classic fairy tale. Tells the fable of the kindly beast and the self-sacrificing beauty whose love releases the prince in him. Contains such visual displays as tears that become real diamonds and walls that grow arms to light Beauty's path through the castle of the Beast.

The fourth installment of the Antoine Doinel series. Antoine is now 26, married and expecting his first child. He is also still struggling to find steady work. Antoine and Christine become the proud parents of a son, but Antoine soon tires of domesticity and when he meets a Japanese woman at his new job he falls in love and has an affair.

Train engineer Jacques lusts after the wife of his co-worker Roubaud. Roubaud kills his boss and Jacques witnesses the murder. In order to keep Jacques quiet, Roubaud allows Jacques to have an affair with his wife, creating a tragic love triangle.

The colorful, electrifying romance that took the Cannes Film Festival by storm courageously dives into a young woman's experiences of first love and sexual awakening. Blue is the Warmest Color stars the remarkable newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos as a high schooler who, much to her own surprise, plunges into a thrilling relationship with a female twentysomething art student, played by Léa Seydoux. Directed by Adbellatif Kechiche, this finely detailed, intimate epic sensitively renders the erotic abandon of youth. It has captivated international audiences and been widely embraced as a defining love story for the new century.

Disc 3: feature film Le bonheur = Happiness (1964) (80 min., col.); The two women of 'Le bonheur' (2006), a short piece featuring actors Claire Drouot and Marie-France Boyer; Thoughts on 'Le bonheur' (2006), a discussion between four intellectuals about the concept of happiness and its relation to the film; two short pieces by Varda investigating people's ideas of happiness; Jean-Claude Drouot returns, a featurette in which the actor revisits the film's setting forty years later; segment from the 1964 television program Démons et merveilles du cinéma, featuring footage of Varda shooting Le bonheur; interview with Varda from 1998 about Le bonheur; Du côté de la côte (1958), a short film by Varda exploring the tourist destination of the Côte d'Azur; theatrical trailer.

A well-off bookseller rescues a tramp from a suicidal plunge into the Seine and his family dedicates itself to reforming him. He shows his gratitude by shaking the household to its foundations, challenging the hidebound principles of his hosts.

A small-time hood kills a policeman and tries to leave France with his American girlfriend

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

In an open-air dance hall, the members of Leca's gang are relaxing with their ladies. One of the ladies, Marie, meets Manda, who is a carpenter by trade. Marie's man Roland is a jealous sort and does not like the idea of Marie and Manda becoming friendly, and Leca himself has his eye on Marie. What follows is a story of love, death, friendship and jealousy during the Belle Epoque.

Charleston parade: shows the journey of a man in blackface to a post-Apocalyptic Paris, where he meets a girl who teaches him the Charleston, and they leave together in his spaceship.
The little match girl: the visions seen by a poor match seller as she lights her matches one by one to keep from freezing to death.
La Marseillaise: a dramatization of the French Revolution, from the period immediately preceding it in 1789 up to the first bloody confrontation.

Drama about the theater and the individuals that made the stage their life. Includes the love story of four men for one woman.

Jérôme spends his July at a lakeside boardinghouse nursing crushes on the sixteen-year-old Laura and, more tantalizingly, Laura's long-legged, blonde half sister, Claire.

Disc 2: feature film Cléo de 5 à 7 = Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) (89 min., col. and b&w); Remembrances (2005), a documentary on the making of the film, featuring interviews with Varda and actors Corinne Marchand and Antoine Bourseiller; gallery of paintings by Hans Baldung Grien, whose work inspired the character of Cléo; excerpt from a 1993 French television program featuring Madonna and Varda talking about the film; Cléo's real path through Paris (2005), a short film retracing, on a motorcycle, Cléo's steps through Paris; Les fiancés du Pont Macdonald (1961), a short film directed by Varda, featuring some of her new-wave colleagues, with Varda explaining why the film was included in Cléo from 5 to 7; L'opéra Mouffe (1958), an early short by Varda, with a score by Georges Delerue; theatrical trailer.

A bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a "collector" of men.

Even among cinema's greatest legends, Jean Vigo stands alone. The son of a notorious anarchist, Vigo had a brief but brilliant career making poetic, lightly surrealist films before his life was cut tragically short by tuberculosis at age twenty-nine. Like the daring early works of his contemporaries Jean Cocteau and Luis Bunũel, Vigo's films refused to play by the rules. This set includes all of Vigo's titles.

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.

A mysterious writer of poison pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau, plagues a French provincial town, unwittingly exposing the collective suspicion and rancor seething beneath the community's calm surface. Brilliantly captures the spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing turning an occupied French town into a twentieth-century Salem style witch-hunt.

Frictions and personality clashes beset the making of a romantic film in Nice.

This bittersweet film from Jean Renoir, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family's picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men. Conceived as a short feature, the project had nearly finished production in 1936 when Renoir was called away for the lower depths. Shooting was abandoned then, but the film was completed with existing footage by Renoir's team and released in its current from in 1946, after the director had already moved on to Hollywood. The result is a warmly humanist vignette that ranks among Renoir's most lyrical works, with a love for nature imbuing its every beautiful frame.

The doctor's horrible experiment: experimental fantasy about a Jekyll/Hyde-type psychiatrist/lunatic creating havoc in 1950s Paris.
The elusive corporal: set in a German P.O.W. camp in 1940, this is the story of a French corporal who is determined to escape to return to Paris and fight once more.

Set amid the military maneuvers and Quatorze de Juillet carnivals of turn-of-the-century France, Jean Renoir's romantic comedy stars Ingrid Bergman as a Polish princess who drives men of all stations to fits of desperate love.

Deep below snowy, cobblestone streets, tucked away in networks of winding subterranean tunnels, lives a civilization of hardworking mice, terrified of the bears who live above ground. Unlike her fellow mice, Celestine is an artist and a dreamer, and when she nearly ends up as breakfast for ursine troubadour Ernest, the two form an unlikely bond.

Sensitively recreating the trials of Truffaut's own childhood, portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime.

François Truffaut's first feature is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut's cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel, The 400 blows sensitively recreates the trails of Truffaut's own difficult childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime.

Nineteenth-century Paris comes alive in Jean Renoir's tale of the opening of the Moulin Rouge. Jean Gabin plays Danglard, who makes the cancan all the rage while juggling the love of two beautiful women: an Egyptian belly-dancer and a naive working girl-turned-cancan star. Includes a cameo by Edith Piaf.

Duty and honor conflict in a German prisoner-of-war camp. An aristocratic French officer becomes friends with the German commandant, a fellow aristocrat, while simultaneously cooperating with his French commoner comrades in a daring escape attempt.

An eighteenth-century comic fantasy about a viceroy in Central America who receives a golden coach and gives it to the star of a touring commedia dell'arte company. Shot and released simultaneously in English, French, and Italian language versions