New Wave

In The Hague, Holland, the new chief of Europol Sellberg broadcasts a tough speech against the third wave of crimes in Europe, promising to suffocate the schemes of powerful criminals. He invites his former detective and friend Johan Falk for a meeting, with the intention to join him to his team. Meanwhile, the executive Rebecca accidentally opens one correspondence of her mate, Kane, and finds that he launders illegal money for European mobsters. When she decides to disclose her discoveries to Europol, her life is jeopardized by the associates of her boy-friend, but Rebecca is rescued by Johan, and they have to fight against the organized crime to save their lives and Johan's family.

Paris, 1887. Douce, a young woman of 17 years, lives with her invalid father, Engelbert de Bonafé, and her domineering grandmother, la comtesse de Bonafé. She is in love with her father’s steward, Fabien, and plans to elope with him. However, Fabien loves Douce’s private tutor and companion, Irène. It was through him that Irène found her current position and he expects her to repay him by starting a new life with him in North America. Irène has higher aspirations, however, and when Engelbert de Bonafé reveals his intentions to marry her, she rejects Fabien. Realising her moment has come, Douce reveals her love to Fabien and tells him she is prepared to give up everything for him. The two lovers plan to set sail for a new life together, but their happiness proves to be short-lived…

One hot afternoon in the south of France, several paths are converging towards a tragic conclusion. Those involved are: Stéphane and Luigi, two cousins who have just emerged from adolescence; Georges, a retired old man; Amélie, Luigi’s girlfriend; and Amélie’s mother Anne. Little do they know how their lives, scarred by fear, humiliation and weariness, will become intertwined and propel them to a terrible outcome…

François Truffaut’s first feature, The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s life-long cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own difficult childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime. The film marks Truffaut’s passage from leading critic of the French New Wave to his emergence as one of Europe’s most brilliant auteurs.

Bay of the Angels (La Baie des anges) stars Jeanne Moreau as a middle-aged Parisian gambling addict who leaves her husband and children and heads for the roulette tables of Nice. There she meets young and handsome Claude Mann–a meeting which coincides with Moreau's first winning streak. She latches onto Mann in the belief that he's a good luck charm, and remains with him even when she starts losing heavily. Mann, emotionally drained, walks out of the relationship. The film ends with Mann entreating Moreau to return with him to the bourgeois existence that she'd escaped in the first scene. Bay of the Angels was directed by Jacques Demy, just before he achieved international fame with his musical films Young Girls of Rochefort and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Timeshift profiles a new wave of Italian crime fiction that has emerged to challenge the conventions of the detective novel. There are no happy endings in these noir tales, only revelations about Italy's dark heart - a world of corruption, unsolved murders and the mafia.

Anne, a student in Paris, becomes involved with a group of her brother's arty friends and gets sucked into a mystery involving Philip, an expatriate American escaping McCarthyism; Terry, a self-destructive femme fatale; theatre director Gerard; and Juan, a Spanish activist who apparently committed suicide, but was he murdered? Philip warns Anne that the forces that killed Juan will soon do the same to Gerard, who is struggling to rehearse Shakespeare's Pericles. Anne takes a part in the play in an attempt to help him and also discover why Juan died.

Unseen by American audiences for thirty years, Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes is a triumphant rediscovery: a deft blend of frank eroticism, moments of Hitchcockian suspense and cinematic derring-do that characterizes the best films of the French New Wave.