The best Jean-Michel Ribes’s movies

The scene is the restless Paris of the interwar years where an attractive and ambitious woman successfully makes her way in a world previously reserved for men: that of high finance. Originating from a humble background, she quickly becomes popular with small savers by offering them outstanding interest rates. Extremely popular, she makes no secret of her taste for the good things in life and her homosexual affairs. They will cost her dearly...

Marguerite loses her wallet, and it's found by Georges, a seemingly happy head of family. As he looks through the wallet and examines the photos of Marguerite, he finds he's fascinated with her and her life, and soon his curiosity about her becomes an obsession.

The day he is released from jail, Serge is expected by four killers sent by Count Charles Varèse assigned to make him confess where he has hidden the jewels stolen during his last stickup. On the other hand the police inspector who arrested him offers him protection on condition he gives him the same piece of information. Serge refuses and is about to be tortured by Varèse's henchmen when Michel, a friendly hood, comes to his rescue. His friendship will result in... a heap of corpses! —Guy Bellinger

Abandoned by his wife, Bernard struggles to overcome his grief and settles in a residence for singles. Employed by "SOS Doctors", he provides night guards to occupy his insomnia. That's how he is brought one night to help a neighbor, Nadine Foulon, victim of discomfort in the elevator. It turns out that Nadine is also going through a difficult time, since her companion, Terry, a singer-guitarist, has left her. A professional photographer, she can not forget it and has since oscillated between depression and bulimia. Gathered by their pains of heart, these two beings will, with the wire of the confidences, become more intimate ...

Not long before World War I, in a French Alpine town near the Italian border, a pack of slaughtered wolves is delivered to local taxidermist Leon (Patrick Chesnais). A surviving black cub comes down from the mountains looking for his family, and is saved from discovery and certain death by Leon’s young daughter Angele, who releases him back into the wild. The Great War comes and goes, making local foundry owners the Garcins rich. Family patriarch Albert Garcin (Michel Galabru), who happens to be Angele’s godfather, has given a free lifetime’s lease of a shack in the hills to a gypsy woman (played in flashbacks by Elisa Tovati in which she’s seen, literally, having dances with wolves on stage). Her son Guiseppe (Stefano Accorsi), who appears to be slightly mentally handicapped, guards the wolves he’s befriended up there, especially the black pack leader he calls Carbone.

A farce, Hoskins plays a photographer who specializes in religious pictures who searches for a model for Jesus. He does a favor for a friend and finds himself doing a voice track for a porno movie with Natasha Richardson. Hoskins finds his model for Jesus in Jeff Goldblum and a romantic triangle begins in which Goldblum finds adoring crowds believing him to be Jesus and then begins to believe it himself.

Three men with a penchant for gambling on the horses soon find themselves in trouble because of their addiction. Pierre (Michel Piccoli) is the math whiz who uses his talent for picking the winners. Charles (Michel Galabru) is the wealthy scrap-iron magnate who has embarrassing evidence on many prominent political figures. Loic (Jacques Dutronc) is the aspiring politico who seeks to further his career by any means possible. Charles approaches Loic and asks his political party for a loan in hopes of fixing an upcoming race....

On 9 January 1836, Pierre Lacenaire goes to the guillotine, a murderer and a thief. He gives Allard, a police inspector, his life story, written while awaiting execution. He also asks Allard to care for Hermine, a lass to whom he has been guardian for more than ten years. In flashbacks, from the prison as Lacenaire writes, from Allard's study as he and Hermine read, and from other readers' memory after the book is published, we see Lacenaire's childhood as he stands up to bullies, including priests, his youthful thieving, his first murder, his brief army career, his seduction of a princess, and his affair with Avril, a young man who dies beside him.

This French war film barely made it past the censors as it is not entirely complimentary about how the French handled themselves in the Algerian War. Four commandos are disciplined for failure to follow orders by being assigned to an especially dangerous and disagreeable mission. Their job is to capture enemy Algerian soldiers.