The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover 1989
The wife of an abusive criminal finds solace in the arms of a kind regular guest in her husband's restaurant.
The wife of an abusive criminal finds solace in the arms of a kind regular guest in her husband's restaurant.
After leaving the asylum, Vincent van Gogh settles in the home of Doctor Gachet, where he keeps painting amidst the torments of his failing mental health. He begins an affair with his host’s daughter, however, she soon realizes that he doesn’t love her and that his heart beats only for art.
Satan tempts Father Dossignan, who is trying to save the soul of a young girl who killed one of her lovers.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the nun Maria is forced to flee her convent. She takes refuge in a brothel, until it is liberated by a woman's anarchist group. Maria joins the group and eventually goes to the front. The women's group faces the problems of fighting not only the nationalists, but also factions on the left seeking to impose a more traditional military structure.
A grizzled, hard-of-hearing cowboy, Slim, and his two friends, Dusty and Pete, capture a mysterious, well-dressed Frenchman.
A look at the last few days of in the life of composer Frédéric Chopin's professional life.
A well-off Indian family is paid an unexpected, and rather unwanted, visit by a man claiming to be the woman's long lost uncle. The initial suspicion with which they greet the man slowly dissolves as he regales them with stories of his travels, tales that are at odds with their conventional middle class perspective on the world.
The story of Polish pedagogue Janusz Korczak and his dedication to protecting Jewish orphans during the war.
Désiré is a fine servant and butler who regularly seduces the ladies of the house where he works, but then he moves on. This time he is working for Odette, the mistress of the minister of Posts and he is living a new situation. He has fallen in love with with Odette.
In 1988, Figaro magazine asked a few famous directors to direct a series of short movies to celebrate the 10 years of the revue. The movies have been released for the French revolution bicentenary. Includes: Werner Herzog's Les Gaulois, David Lynch's The Cowboy and the Frenchman, Andrzej Wajda's Proust contre la déchéance, Luigi Comencini's Pèlerinage à Agen, Jean-Luc Godard's Le dernier mot.
Each evening, four men – a doctor, a journalist, a professor and a merchant – meet up in a deserted bar to play cards. As they play, the bar’s owner, her downtrodden barman (nicknamed “le paltoquet”) and a strange woman in white watch from a distance. One night, the card game is disturbed when a police inspector suddenly appears and declares that a dead body has been found nearby. Certain that one of the four men is the murderer, the inspector starts his investigation. All the evidence suggests that the doctor did the deed, but we soon learn that nothing is quite what it seems…
A possible impostor torments a newly crowned medieval czar who may have ordered the real successor's death.
Paris, October 1948. Nino, Gilles, Donald, Barbara and their friends are a new breed of spectators. They discover the cinema as art, they are moviegoers. They will try to realize their grand project: to found a film club. "My film first wants to be a testimony of young people who have lived for a passion. Cinema"
Two segments make up this short film. The first portion called “The French” has two men taste testing some delicious wine, and the other, titled “The Gauls”, is of men playing rugby. This short by Werner Herzog is part of the “The French as Seen By…” series. It was initiated and sponsored by the newspaper Le Figaro, as part of the 1988 celebration of the tenth anniversary of its magazine section.
The film tells the story of a love affair between a poor poet and an equally poor seamstress in 19th century Paris.
Jacques asks a public writer to compose love letters for a beautiful stranger that he pretends he has just met.
When a wealthy patriarch falls ill on his 70th birthday, three of his sons rush in from Calcutta, leading to a reunion filled with painful ironies and lingering disillusionment. As the family—including an addled fourth son who lives with the old man—watches and waits, the static occasion brings out simmering tensions in their family dynamics, from the father’s moral rectitude to the business ambition of two sons and the withdrawal of their siblings.
Dodo, a French man living in Florida, has one goal in life: Get by without working. Difficult to implement without the help of some women. Betty is one of them, and a gypsy's bride, who suddenly disappears, changing Dodo's life.
A Polish Resistance fighter who survived the Nazi years cannot accept the new Communist power.
This is 1920: Sophia and Trofim Ivanytch have been living on Vassilievski Island, which is part of Petrograd, for thirteen years. In their house, which looks like a ship wreck, the atmosphere is gloomy. Sophia cannot have children and she is aware that, because of that, she is likely to lose her husband. That is why, when their neighbor dies, she asks Trofim to take in Ganka, his orphaned thirteen-year-old daughter. Trofim agrees and their new life begins...