Movies: Valentine Tessier

Paris, 1482. Today is the festival of the fools, taking place like each year in the square outside Cathedral Notre Dame. Among jugglers and other entertainers, Esmeralda, a sensuous gypsy, performs a bewitching dance in front of delighted spectators....

Police Commissioner Jules Maigret returns to the small village where he spent his childhood at the request of the Countess of Saint-Fiacre, who has received a disturbing anonymous letter....

Nineteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in Jean Renoir’s exhilarating tale of the opening of the world-renowned Moulin Rouge. Jean Gabin plays the wily impresario Danglard, who makes the cancan all the rage while juggling the love of two beaut...

Lydia (Danielle Darrieux) is a student, poor and orphaned, who pretends to be the daughter of a famous writer....

Soon after the death of his first wife (whose dowry was inadequate), Charles Bovary, a country doctor in Normandy, marries Emma Rouault. In her new home, Emma finds conflict with her mother-in-law, a husband uninterested in the social whirl, and gene...

In the early 16th century, Italy is ruled by the powerful Borgia family, led by César Borgia and his sister Lucrèce. In a ruthless power play, César plots to have his sister’s husband murdered. But without her brother’s knowledge, Lucrèce has taken a...

Elsa Lundenstein is accused of having murdered her lover. The jury discusses the case vividly. All members are somehow prejudiced because of personal life experience and subsequently each member reads something different into the presented facts....

When Michel gets the life-sized sex doll he ordered, shipped directly from Japan, he is only intrigued by it at first. Then the silent unresponsiveness of the thing begins to haunt him, and he finds himself reacting to it as if it were an equally unr...

In his prison cell, the composer Remi Bonvent composed an opera, The columns bed. The director of the prison, Porey Cave, succeeds made believe he is the author of this work. The death of the two protagonists will prevent the discovery of the truth....

The story takes plays during the annual Good Friday pageant in a tiny Italian village. Local priest Don Vincenzo faces a crisis when the girl selected to play the Virgin Mary shows up pregnant....

After being hurt in the face, Count de Roger Tinchebraye is forced to hide his disfigured face behind a leather mask. Dispirited for a while, he decides to become a Casanova-like seductor. When he meets true love, cynical Roger does not believe in it...

La neige était sale is based on a novel and play by the phenomenally prolific Georges Simenon. Upon learning that his mother was a prostitute, Frank (Daniel Gelin) dejectedly vows that he, too, will live a life of debauchery. Part of his self-degrada...

French version of the Selma Lagerlof story, most famously filmed in 1921 by Victor Sjostrom, about a poor sinner who only realizes what misery he's wrought when he dies on New Year's Eve and is collected by Death in his carriage....

A hotel for women-only and catering to working girls is the setting for not being able to get a USA PCA seal-of-approval for this French-film, but New York City's 55th Playhouse played it anyway. Along the way the audience meets the girl who sneaked ...

In a maternity hospital, young single mothers are accompanied by social worker Hélène Lambert, who tries to make them aware of their new responsibilities, while Dr. Baurain stresses the importance of their moral and sexual education. They come to the...

In a girls boarding-school run by Madame Piégeois, young Gisèle meets, at night, the count of Champrès' son....

A hero of the Paris streets is recruited for a conspiracy against Mazarin in the court of the King, but he reveals the subversive plot to Anne of Austria....

The young Loris is undergoing a trial for killing his girlfriend Maria Luce. According to the reconstruction of the facts, the young man would shoot his mistress making it then end up under the wheels of a tram. On the remains of the woman's body, ho...

In 19th-century France, a little girl follows her two sisters into a Carmelite monastery with the goal of becoming a saint....

Middle-aged lust: a man, in his thirteenth and therefore omen-filled marriage year, cheats on his wife....