The best Jean-Claude Dreyfus’s drama movies

Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer who plans to build an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, so, in order to finance his project, he embarks on an epic adventure to collect rubber, a very profitable product, in a remote and unexplored region of the rainforest.

Two tigers are separated as cubs and taken into captivity, only to be reunited years later as enemies by an explorer (Pearce) who inadvertently forces them to fight each other.

Young Frenchwoman Mathilde searches for the truth about her missing fiancé, lost during World War I, and learns many unexpected things along the way. The love of her life is gone. But she refuses to believe he's gone forever — and she needs to know for sure.

A collective film of 33 shorts directed by different directors about their feeling about cinema.

Philippe Jordan is a policeman prone to advancing the cause of justice by any means necessary. On his agenda is a powerful drug cartel working out of Paris and Marseilles, with a drug lord who is essentially inaccessible -- but not immortal.

A girl, Marie is led into prostitution by her pimp boyfriend, Gerard. She must not only give money to him but to the gangsters that explore him as well. Marie, together with a friend, Maloup, will try to become independent. They start to work the streets on their own but they will meet physical and sexual violence. They return to the brothels, and Marie goes back to her pimp, but Gerard has his caprices and wants more and more – he's in a spiral downwards and he's leading Marie with him. There's seems to be no escape.

The first episode – featuring frequent Borowczyk muse Marina Pierro – is the longest and, in a way, most substantial: it’s set in Renaissance Rome, with the lusty (and perpetually nude) leading lady sexually involved with famous painters and church benefactors. The second episode is the most notorious and, consequently, gave the film its controversial poster – featuring a rabbit slowly disappearing under the skirt of a teenage girl (played by Gaelle Legrand). The third and final episode, which has a modern-day setting, is the shortest – but also, possibly, the most outrageous: Pascale Christophe is a young married woman who’s abducted on a busy Parisian street by a small-time hood hidden inside a cardboard box!

Italian-French-British TV film targeting the US audience, about the fashion icon Coco Chanel. The film begins with the fashion goddess (deftly played by Shirley MacLaine) in her twilight years, steeped in wealth and fame, still issuing game-changing designs and collections. From here the biopic looks backwards to the woman's upbringing in an orphanage, and traces her path to ubiquity as it winds through poverty, wars, doomed romances, and rather glamorous betrayals.

A criminal shows up at a farmhouse with the law on his heels and several million dollars in his possession.

After losing both her parents, young Sylvie is enrolled in a strict boarding school of Victorian English education. The school readily and willingly resorts to a very strict regime of correction and corporal punishment to discipline its female pupils and the young girls compensate for the rigors of their education by devoting themselves to all kinds of kinky schoolgirl sexual encounters.

It's late 17th century. The viola da gamba player Monsieur de Sainte Colombe comes home to find that his wife died while he was away. In his grief he builds a small house in his garden into wich he moves to dedicate his life to music and his two young daughters Madeleine and Toinette, avoiding the outside world. Rumor about him and his music is widespread, and even reaches to the court of Louis XIV, who wants him at his court in Lully's orchestra, but Monsieur de Sainte Colombe refuses. One day a young man, Marin Marais, comes to see him with a request, he wants to be taught how to play the violin.

In a futuristic society, contestants pit their survival skills against each other in a fight to the death for cash prizes, and the contest is aired live on television.

Paul is a sweet man-child, raised — and smothered — by his two eccentric aunts in Paris since the death of his parents when he was a toddler. Now thirty-three, he still does not speak. Paul's aunts have only one dream for him: to win piano competitions. Although Paul practices dutifully, he remains unfulfilled until he submits to the interventions of his upstairs neighbour. Suitably named after the novelist, Madame Proust offers Paul a concoction that unlocks repressed memories from his childhood and awakens the most delightful of fantasies.

Grace Dalrymple Elliot is a British aristocrat trapped in Paris during the French Revolution. Determined to maintain her stiff upper lip and pampered life despite the upheaval, Grace continues her friendship with the Duke of Orléans while risking her life and liberty to protect a fugitive.

A film with emphasis on visuals and music, the plot concerns characters who meet in present time, mainly the male gypsy Jesus, and the female thief and con-artist Odona, who share parallel experiences from lives 2000 years in the past. These stories are juxtaposed.

This fast-paced mystery is in part based on a novel by Yves Ellena and is at least equally based on the 1943 classic Le Corbeau, which in 1951 was produced in English by Otto Preminger as The Thirteenth Letter. In this movie, someone is using a pirate radio broadcast to dish the dirt on the lives of the elite of a small French town.

Robert Avranche, a middle-aged, alcoholic garage owner, is sitting on a train, reflecting on the emptiness of his life. An attractive young woman, Donatienne, suddenly enters the compartment and offers to make love to him. Robert accepts but, when the woman leaves the train afterwards, he decides to follow her...

Romance meets farce against the backdrop of a quiet campaign to legalize gay marriage. Laurent loves his roommate Dan, who's straight and a playboy. Laurent can't bring himself to tell Dan, but is content to share a flat and to party with him. Then Camille comes along, Dan falls hard, and Laurent is beside himself: he tries to sabotage the relationship, but each effort backfires. After Dan moves in with Camille, Laurent enlists the help of Sam, his new lesbian flatmate, and Nick, a long-time gay friend. As the lovers head toward marriage, Laurent becomes more desperate. His efforts may be having an effect, if not on Dan, then on Camille. Which love will triumph?

Eléonore is a gorgeous twenty-year-old who has lost her parents and one of her arms in an accident. She lives in an orphanage in Burgandy.