Thanks for the Gesture

This is a surreal comedy is about a factory set in a barren landscape that dispenses a minute portion of water to stragglers carrying pans as receptacles. Inside, the workers seem to be doing nothing that makes any sense, and they are watched over by a periscope set up by twins who run the factory. An unexplained, plain woman living on the premises is sought after by the whimsical foreman (Maurice Benichou) -- also known as the "gardener" because he has planted flowers in the coal wagons that remain on a maze of train tracks -- the only "stock" owned by the company.

The pragmatic, reserved and refined Maigret investigates murders in his singular unhurried manner and inevitably discovers the truth.

By the will of her dead uncle who was murdered Sandra Paoli is propelled to the head of a powerful mafia clan. She becomes a respected, but also hated, woman in a world of men, murder and criminality.

Mathieu is called on by the French government to investigate murders in the Asian community of Paris. With Chinese and Vietnamese engaged in a bloody slaughterfest, the key to the mystery lies with the orphan girl who Mathieu helped to escape during the fall of Saigon in 1975. Now a beautiful young woman, Mathieu is reunited ten years later with the refugee, and together they attempt to solve the case. He uncovers a CIA plot that has carried over from the last days of the Vietnam War and that is related to the Paris murders.

Camille arrives in Ouessant, the island of her birth off the Brittany coast, to sell the family home. She spends a last night in the house during which she discovers a secret. In 1963 a man came to work with her father, who was the Jument lighthouse operator. He only stayed two months, but his presence proved to be a disturbing catalyst.

In 1850, on the isolated French island of Saint-Pierre, a murder shocks the natives. Two fishermen are arrested. One of them, Louis Ollivier, dies in custody. The other, Neel Auguste, is sentenced to death by the guillotine. The island is so small that it has neither a guillotine nor an executioner. While those are sent for Auguste is placed under the supervision of an army Captain.

Themroc, a bachelor house painter living at home with his mother, leads a sad and colorless life. One day, after a run-in with his boss, he rebels. He wrecks his apartment, rejects every facet of bourgeois life, and begins acting like an urban, modern-day Neanderthal.

Stephane, the wife of a prominent magistrate, shoots and kills a man in her home and claims he tried to rape her. While investigating her case, her lawyer becomes hopelessly enmeshed in a web of lies and subterfuges concerning her past.

In the Médoc, a young woman is found drowned. An accident, her influential family of winegrowers maintains. Or rather murder, as the American inspector Morrison suspects. If so, why? What secrets this family keeps?

Paul and Rene, two men in their forties weary with life. One a widower, the other is divorced and pays alimony to his ex-wife. They live together, go on vacations together. This last vacation has been a washout and so is their return.

On the hill in Saint-Cloud, in a broad street bordered by residences, a delivery man is going through the back of his van. He prepares the delivery: wine, water, alcohol... After checking the order he routinely loads the crate on his shoulder and strides under his load through a small delivery gate in the wall of a garden, he rings and enters... All the action will take place in one night, a single night, in this bourgeois house in Saint-Cloud.

Experiencing something of a mid-life crisis after his beloved son marries and moves out, a factory worker makes some drastic changes in his life, moves in with the boy and his wife, and sets them all on the path to a communal lifestyle.

60 years ago, pianist Julie Bernstein was involved in an accident while her sister Gloria was taking a risky car ride. Her hands have been mutilated ever since and she suffers from cancer. When Julie learns that she was deceived by Gloria during a love affair in 1917, she swears revenge.

Film montage of documents shot between 1895 and 1900 by the operators of the Lumière brothers.