The best Dominique Valadié’s drama movies

While Olivier, a 39 year-old foreman gives his job everything he’s got, Laura, his wife and the mother of their two children, abandons the family home, leaving Olivier alone to face his responsibilities. Lost and completely thrown, Olivier is going to have to come to terms with his new status as a single father raising his children alone. Because Laura’s not coming back.

In Lyon, where many are unemployed, Marie is a prostitute who loves her work: she's thoughtful and exuberant toward clients old and young, slim or flabby. One night, a homeless man sleeps in the foyer of her apartment house; she gives him a hot meal, then a place on the floor to sleep by her radiator, then she offers herself. She falls in love, giving him new life, clothes, a place to live. When he grouses that he must bar hop while she uses the flat for her work, she finds them a larger flat. He grows restless, seducing a manicurist and pressing her to prostitution. He's arrested for procuring, so Marie must decide what to do; he, too, must face the consequences of his choices.

Laura is still waiting for Prince Charming at the age of 24. So when Sandro appears at a party, exactly like her Prince would in her dreams, she thinks she's found the right one. But then again, when she meets Maxime, Laura starts to wonder if some Princes could be more charming than others? Of course Sandro has problems of his own : his father, Pierre, just bumped into Madam Irma at his father's funeral and this reminded him of the date of his own death which Madame Irma had predicted ages ago. Now Pierre is unable to make any plans, not with his new partner Eleonore, nor with Sandro. And Maxime has his own problems, and so does Eleonore, Marianne, Jacqueline and many others. But don't worry, in the end, they'll all live happily ever after.

A young Parisian must make major decisions about pregnancy, a job and her boyfriend.

The first film shot by legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji and anchored by a heartbreaking performance by Sophie Rochut, EMBRASSE-MOI is a slice-of-life drama about Louise, an 12-year-old girl left to her own devices over the summer following her parents’ divorce. Her mother is a renowned concert pianist, anxious to begin a second life free of entanglements. Her father is a workaholic industrialist, distracted to the point of denial about the collapse of his marriage. Rosier’s command of her cast is impossible to deny, as is the brave unsentimentality of EMBRASSE-MOI’s approach: Louise clocks her mother’s newer, younger lover in one brazen panning shot across his naked body. While Rosier denied any autobiographical interpretations of EMBRASSE-MOI, it’s hard not to read at least a kinship between Louie’s solitude and the filmmaker’s own relationship with her famous mother Hélène Gordon-Lazareff (founder of Elle) and stepfather Pierre Lazareff, who adopted Michèle as his own.

Benedict missed Mother's funeral. He was stuck in the Eurostar. In the offbeat as always, and a little pitiful, he joined the family home to find his brother, his two sisters - and in a merry bazaar, many memories. There, in the remnants of his childhood, in the intimacy of his room, he sees her - She is waiting for him. And she will not let go.