Love at Twenty unites five directors from five different countries to present their different perspectives on what love really is at the age of 20. The episodes are united with the score of Georges Delerue and still photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Two men share an odd friendship while they care for two women who are both in deep comas.
For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.
The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.
The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.
A mix of home-video and documentary styles about a group of young people who have decided to get to know their “inner-idiots” and thus not only facing and breaking their outer appearance but also their inner.
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.
A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he attempts to persuade a girl to run away to Italy with him.
Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play in a production by The New Group, directed by Scott Elliott. Dodge (Ed Harris) and Halie (Amy Madigan) try to hang on to their farmland and their sanity while caring for their two wayward grown sons (Rich Sommer and Paul Sparks). When their grandson (Nat Wolff) arrives no one seems to recognize him and a secret must be kept.
While Camille refuses Perdican's advances, she takes offense when he courts Rosette. Then begins a confrontation of pride, where each seeks to establish his ascendancy over the other in the name of love.
Slevin is mistakenly put in the middle of a personal war between the city’s biggest criminal bosses. Under constant watch, Slevin must try not to get killed by an infamous assassin and come up with an idea of how to get out of his current dilemma.
The third in a series of films featuring François Truffaut's alter-ego, Antoine Doinel, the story resumes with Antoine being discharged from military service. His sweetheart Christine's father lands Antoine a job as a security guard, which he promptly loses. Stumbling into a position assisting a private detective, Antoine falls for his employers' seductive wife, Fabienne, and finds that he must choose between the older woman and Christine.
Now aged 17, Antoine Doinel works in a factory which makes records. At a music concert, he meets a girl his own age, Colette, and falls in love with her. Later, Antoine goes to extraordinary lengths to please his new girlfriend and her parents, but Colette still only regards him as a casual friend. First segment of “Love at Twenty” (1962).
Antoine is now 30, working as a proofreader and getting divorced from his wife. It's the first "no-fault" divorce in France and a media circus erupts, dredging up Antoine's past. Indecisive about his new love with a store clerk, he impulsively takes off with an old flame.
A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.
During a writing slump, playwright J.M. Barrie meets a widow and her four children, all young boys—who soon become an important part of Barrie’s life and the inspiration that lead him to create his masterpiece. Peter Pan.
The true, harrowing story of a young Jewish girl who, with her family and their friends, is forced into hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
Madame Jouve, the narrator, tells the tragedy of Bernard and Mathilde. Bernard was living happily with his wife Arlette and his son Thomas. One day, a couple, Philippe and Mathilde Bauchard, moves into the next house. This is the accidental reunion of Bernard and Mathilde, who had a passionate love affair years ago. The relationship revives... A somber study of human feelings.
A tolerant veterinarian turns the other cheek when annoyed but changes his nature when he falls in love.
Bruno is released from prison. He looks for a job and tries to start a new life. His first stop is at his father's apartment.
Young Benny Goodman is taught clarinet by a music professor. He is advised to play whichever kind of music he likes best, but to make a living, Benny begins by joining the Ben Pollack traveling band.
Popeye is heading over to see Olive when he hits a traffic island where a cop is directing traffic; when he gets there, he manages to get more tickets for blowing his horn and parking illegally. The cop rings the bell, and Popeye manages to wreck Olive's apartment by dropping what he's doing, each time he writes a ticket.
1645. Guadeloupe. Ibátali, a Kalinago native and wife of a French colonist, leads Olaudah, an escaped African captive, on a journey where he may lose his freedom and his life. She is ready to sacrifice him to save her own skin. But their wounds bring them together. Will this be enough to make them something other than what colonisation has decided they should be: a savage to be exterminated, an African to be enslaved?
This uneven comedy of manners concerns a young film projectionist (Jerome Ange) who sets out to find a marriageable woman. He sets his sights on two women he has lived with for nearly ten years (Kristin Scott-Thomas and Sylvie Orcier). For some reason, the projectionist encourages one of the women to hire a private detective (Patrice Kerbrat) to monitor his romantic activities.
Prof. Henri Laborit uses the stories of the lives of three people to discuss behaviorist theories of survival, combat, rewards and punishment, and anxiety. René is a technical manager at a textile factory and must face the anxiety caused by corporate downsizing. Janine is a self-educated actress/stylist who learns that the wife of her lover is dying and must decide to let them reunite. Jean is a controversial career-climbing writer/politician at a crossroads in life.
A WWI veteran decides to build a memorial to all of the people who have mattered to him but are now dead.
A young Frenchwoman fleeing her Italian fiancé in Caracas thrusts herself and those around her into madcap events.
Sabine vows to give up married lovers, and is determined to find a good husband. Her best friend Clarisse introduces her to her cousin Edmond, a busy lawyer from Paris. Sabine pursues Edmond, with the encouragement of Clarisse, but Edmond does not seem very interested.
A shallow, provincial wife finds her relationship with her preoccupied husband strained by romantic notions of love, leading her further towards Paris and the country wilderness.
Proud, eccentric, and antisocial, Monsieur Hire has always kept to himself. But after a woman turns up dead in the Paris suburb where he lives, he feels drawn to a pretty young newcomer to town and discovers that his neighbors are only too ready to suspect the worst of him.
When her father decides to flee to England, young Sylvia Scarlett must become Sylvester Scarlett and protect her father every step of the way, with the questionable help of plenty others.
17 year old Nói drifts through life on a remote fjord in Iceland. In winter, the fjord is cut off from the outside world, surrounded by ominous mountains and buried under a shroud of snow. Nói dreams of escaping from this white-walled prison with Íris, a city girl who works in a local gas station. But his clumsy attempts at escape spiral out of control.
In Paris around 1900, a young man raised by his wealthy uncle plots revenge after his cousin is betrothed to a rich neighbor. He steals the fiancé's family jewels, reveling in the thrill, and sets off on a lifelong path of burglary.
Otavio is an idealistic union leader trying to organize workers at a factory to resist the company's exploitative practices. His son, Tião, one of the employees, is more of a realist and doesn't want to risk losing his job by striking. This clash of perspectives puts the father and son at odds. Fortunately, Tião's mother, Romana, is on hand to act as a moderator between the two opinionated men.
Set in France at the end of World War II Albert Dehousse finds out his father wasn't a war hero and his mother is a collaborator.
At the end of the 19th century, during a ball in Joinville, on the outskirts of Paris, Georges, a former delinquent working as a carpenter, meets Marie, a young woman connected to a criminal gang.
A band of murderous cowboys has imposed a reign of terror on the town of Warlock. With the sheriff humiliatingly run out of town, the residents hire the services of Clay Blaisedell as de facto town marshal. He arrives along with his friend, Tom Morgan, and sets about restoring law and order on his own terms whilst also overseeing the establishment of a gambling house and saloon.