Jacques Denis

Two men, fortyish, worn out by their wives, abandon everything to go and live in the back of beyond. There they meet a truculent priest, a boozer, Émile who recalls them to life's simple pleasures. Calm is what they want. But soon their example inspires thousands of disorientated males...

On her way to visit her childhood home in a colonial outpost in Northern Cameroon, a young French woman recalls her childhood, her memories concentrating on her family's houseboy.

Robert Avranche, a middle-aged, alcoholic garage owner, is sitting on a train, reflecting on the emptiness of his life. An attractive young woman, Donatienne, suddenly enters the compartment and offers to make love to him. Robert accepts but, when the woman leaves the train afterwards, he decides to follow her...

Arthur and Marcel, two firemen, keep boredom at bay by improvising on stage, one on a keyboard the other on drums, tunes, poems and songs. Carol arrives, in search of her lover Armand. Accompanied by the musicians, she sings of her strange loves.

A look at the lives of several men and women in their 30s as they confront the slim gains of the "revolutionary" sixties. Max, a dissatisfied copy editor; Myriam, a redhead into tantric sex; and Marie, a supermarket checker who gives unauthorized discounts to the elderly, search for renewed meaning on a communal farm. The title character, a six-year-old child, is the carrier of their hopes for the future.

A lazy surveyor is thwarted by two women whose houses he is surveying for destruction to make way for a park. In another realm of the story, a man is given a hat by another man, who asks him to give his fiancé a gift. However, he mistakenly gives the gift to another girl entirely, and makes love to her.

Writer Paul attempts to interview Rosemonde, a young woman who killed an alleged rapist in self-defense six years prior, for a true crime television program. When Rosemonde refuses to divulge details of the events, Paul encourages his actress girlfriend to befriend her, but the three are repeatedly sidetracked from their initial commission.

In Brazzaville, in 1944, Alex Emmerich was sentenced to wander the seas by Hélène Latray, the wife of Félix Beauvois, the man Alex loved. In 1962, exiled on Hatray cruises and feeling the coming death, Alex decides to compose for his love a testament: the photographic report of his agony.

A retired old man sees his life turned upside down by the discovery of the corpse of a young woman.

Following the assassination of President Marc Jarry, a member of the investigation committee refuses to sign off on the committee's final findings.

Michel Descombes is a watchmaker who lives in Lyon with his teenage son Bernard. When the police visit and inform him that Bernard has killed a man and is on the run with a girl, Michel realises that he knew far less about his son than he thought.

As he sets off for the countryside outside Geneva a taxi-driver hears a gunshot and notices a shadowy figure slipping away from the scene. So begins a series of strange incidents.

A father is scheming to have his slightly mental daughter from an earlier marriage killed by allowing a murderous psychopath to be released from the asylum and led to his house. However, the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other.

An unknown Polish writer can't publish his novels, so his ex-wife decides to help him and get some of the profit for herself. She finally finds a publisher, but there's a strange single condition that could cost the writer his life.

Industrious accountant David Martinaud claims to be visiting his parents every weekend, but it's merely a cover for the labor-intensive refurbishing of his country cottage. The reason for David's secrecy is that his childhood crush, Lise, lives nearby, and, although she's married, he still believes they'll get together. His devotion to the idea borders on mania, and, when Lise's husband is accidentally killed, he quickly spirals out of control.

Young - beautiful - married, fulfilled, Martha is bored. Passive in an active society, she took a first step by serving as a "guinea pig" to her brother researcher who undertook a comparative study on animal behavior and human behavior.

This comedy brings Pierre Richard and Michel Piccoli together onscreen once again. In the story, former professor Henri Toussaint Piccoli has been locked away in a psychiatric ward for some years for trying to strangle his wife when he found her in bed with another man. Now she has a terminal illness, and wants some sort of reconciliation with him. His therapist (Richard) decides to permit him to visit with her, provided he comes along. Except for his wide mood swings and occasional outbursts of lewd muttering, the professor "passes" for sane fairly easily. Not so the psychotic (Dominique Pinon) who stows away in the psychiatrist's car, who constantly calls attention to the other two.

A couple deal with their problems like any other, while actors read Friedrich Engels' "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", and in interviews, the director discusses the status of women in 1978.

In the 1930s a young fellow, Simon Chalumet, is sent to a military school by his overbearing father, an ex-soldier who has little sympathy for his son's more gentle temperament, or for his interest in films.

A radio host meets a woman who breaks into houses.

Paul is married, a successful engineer, and a conservative candidate in an upcoming local election. He falls in love with Adriana, a café waitress from Italy. Paul's party is very critical of foreign labour and wants to keep Switzerland to the Swiss. Where Paul falls deeper and deeper into the relationship and is ready to leave his wife, Adriana feels the social pressure growing and has to make her own decision.

Pierre and Paul, journalist and writer respectively, team up to write a screenplay based on the real story of a young woman accused by her uncle of trying to kill him. They decide to meet her.