Tag Archives: France

La grande bellezza / The Great Beauty (2013) Paolo Sorrentino, Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Drama

La grande bellezza AKA The Great Beauty (2013)
Journalist Jep Gambardella has charmed and seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades. Since the legendary success of his one and only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city’s literary and social circles, but when his sixty-fifth birthday coincides with a shock from the past, Jep finds himself unexpectedly taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries, and looking past the extravagant nightclubs, parties, and cafés to find Rome in all its glory: a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.
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Omaret yakobean / The Yacoubian Building (2006) Marwan Hamed, Adel Imam, Nour El-Sherif, Youssra, Drama

Omaret yakobean AKA The Yacoubian Building (2006)
Cairo: a 70-year-old building of once-luxury flats with tenements on the roof. Zika, an aging libertine, feuds with his sister. Pius Haj Azzam takes a second wife, in secret, to satisfy sexual drive within religious bounds. Bothayna, poor and beautiful, supports her family, wanting to do so with dignity intact. Her former fiancé, Taha, the janitor’s son, humiliated by the police, turns to fundamentalism. Hatem, a gay editor, seduces and corrupts a young man from the sticks. Two brothers, Copts, one a tailor and one Zika’s factotum, connive for property. Allah is on most everyone’s lips, and corruption is in their hearts. European values, both refined and worldly, provide a subtext.
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L’amour d’une femme / The Love of a Woman (1953) Jean Grémillon, Micheline Presle, Massimo Girotti, Gaby Morlay, Drama

L'amour d'une femme (1953)
Marie Prieur, a young doctor, decides to settle down on Ushant, a remote island belonging to Brittany. Little by little she manages to be accepted by the population. One day she meets André Lorenzi, a handsome engineer, and it is love at first sight. Life is wonderful for a while but André wants to marry her only if she remains at home. Despite her strong feelings for André, Marie refuses to give up her vocation and the two lovers part. Marie finds herself alone, with a broken heart.
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Ein Unbekannter rechnet ab / Ten Little Indians (1974) Peter Collinson, Charles Aznavour, Maria Rohm, Adolfo Celi, Crime, Mystery, Thriller

Ein Unbekannter rechnet ab (1974)
A group is invited, under false pretenses, to an isolated hotel in the Iranian desert. After dinner, a cassette tape accuses them all of crimes that they have gotten away with. One by one they begin to die, in accordance to the Ten Little Indians nursery rhyme. After a search is made of the hotel, they realize that the murderer is one of them. A few members of the group attempt to trust each other, but the question still remains, who can one trust? And who will leave the hotel alive?
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L’adversaire / The Adversary (2002) Nicole Garcia, Daniel Auteuil, Géraldine Pailhas, François Cluzet, Crime, Drama, Mystery

L'adversaire (2002)
Based on the 2000 book of the same name by Emmanuel Carrère, it is inspired by the real-life story of Jean-Claude Romand. L’Adversaire’s protagonist Jean-Marc Faure (Auteuil) pursues an imaginary career as a doctor of medicine in a plot more closely based on Romand’s life and Carrère’s book than was Laurent Cantet’s 2001 film L’Emploi du Temps. The film was nominated for a Palme d’Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
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