Yves Montand

In a decrepit South American village, four men are hired to transport an urgent nitroglycerine shipment without the equipment that would make it safe.

Using the interrogation of a US counterinsurgency agent as a backdrop, the film explores the consequences of the struggle between Uruguay's government and the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas.

The master of the political thriller, Costa-Gavras became an instant phenomenon after the mammoth success of Z, and he quickly followed it with the equally riveting The Confession. Based on a harrowing true story from the era of Soviet bloc show trials, the film stars Yves Montand as a Czechoslovak Communist Party official who, in the early fifties, is abducted, imprisoned, and interrogated over a frighteningly long period, and left in the dark about his captors’ motives. Also starring Simone Signoret and Gabriele Ferzetti, the film is an unflinching, intimate depiction of one of the twentieth century’s darkest chapters, told from one bewildered man’s point of view.

The sun-dappled beauty of the Provence countryside belies dark motivations, in the first installment of Claude Berri’s monumental pastoral tragedy. When the naively idealistic tax collector Jean Cadoret (Gérard Depardieu) unexpectedly inherits a family farm, he leaves the city for a new life in the agrarian community where his mother, Florette, grew up—though she moved away decades ago. His neighbors, however, the scheming Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) and his proud uncle César Soubeyran (Yves Montand), have plotted to divert the flow of water away from Jean’s land. Brought to extraordinary life by acting legends Depardieu, Auteuil, and Montand, JEAN DE FLORETTE draws viewers into a fully realized vision of 1920s rural France in which the culture clash between modern ideas and the rustic older codes of the country takes a heartbreaking turn.

Shot simultaneously with JEAN DE FLORETTE, this second chapter in the epic story of the intersecting fates of the Cadoret and Soubeyran families unfolds ten years after the events of the first film, as Jean Cadoret’s daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart, in a César-winning performance), now a teenage shepherdess, learns of the circumstances that drove her family to ruin—and seeks revenge on those responsible. A stirring portrait of a young woman’s awakening to her own agency, MANON OF THE SPRING brings to a close Claude Berri’s sweeping Marcel Pagnol adaptation with a devastating power that approaches Greek tragedy.

When the photographer he loves is murdered, a reclusive detective is assigned to solve to the case — one in which he becomes the chief suspect.

A Hollywood actress disguises herself as a geisha to convince her producer-husband to cast her in his Japan-based production of MADAME BUTTERFLY.

Daisy Gamble, an unusual woman who hears phones before they ring, and does wonders with her flowers, wants to quit smoking, to please her finacee, Warren. She goes to a doctor of hypnosis to do it. But once she's under, her doctor finds out that she can regress into past lives and different personalities, and he finds himself falling in love with one of them.

A millionaire is out to destroy a show that makes fun of him, until he meets cast member Monroe. To get closer to her he joins the cast and hires Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly and Milton Berle (as themselves) to teach him the performing arts.

Oscar-winning editing and sound propel this action-packed look at the intertwining lives of four competitive Grand Prix race car drivers.

The last of the celebrated collaborations between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert (CHILDREN OF PARADISE) unfolds in a dreamily beautiful vision of a wintry, nocturnal Paris shortly after the city’s postwar liberation. It’s there that Jean Diego (Yves Montand in one of his first film roles), a former member of the French underground Resistance, has an encounter with destiny as he meets a long-lost comrade, villains of the war, a prophetic tramp, and a beautiful woman who will draw him into an inexorable tragedy. A richly allegorical evocation of a country reckoning with the guilt and national trauma of World War II and the occupation, LES PORTES DE LA NUIT (“The Gates of the Night”) was a tough sell for postwar audiences looking for escapism, but it can now be appreciated for both its haunting atmosphere and unique fusion of poetic fantasy and bitter reality.