The best Philippe du Janerand’s drama movies

Set in 1940's France, a new teacher at a school for disruptive boys gives hope and inspiration.

In 1429 a teenage girl from a remote French village stood before her King with a message she claimed came from God; that she would defeat the world's greatest army and liberate her country from its political and religious turmoil. Following her mission to reclaim god's diminished kingdom - through her amazing victories until her violent and untimely death.

A well-to-do French family living in Calais deal with a series of setbacks and crises while paying little attention to the grim conditions in the refugee camps within a few miles of their home.

In 1942, in an occupied Paris, the apolitical grocer Edmond Batignole lives with his wife and daughter in a small apartment in the building of his grocery. When his future son-in-law and collaborator of the German Pierre-Jean Lamour calls the Nazis to arrest the Jewish Bernstein family, they move to the confiscated apartment. Some days later, the young Simon Bernstein escapes from the Germans and comes to his former home. When Batignole finds him, he feels sorry for the boy and lodges him, hiding Simon from Pierre-Jean and also from his wife. Later, two cousins of Simon meet him in the cellar of the grocery. When Pierre-Jean finds the children, Batignole decides to travel with the children to Switzerland.

To get royal backing on a needed drainage project, a poor French lord must learn to play the delicate games of wit at court at Versailles.

Transport Minister Bertrand Saint-Jean is awoken in the middle of the night by his head of staff. A bus has gone off the road into a gully. He has no choice but to go to the scene of the accident. Thus begins the odyssey of a politician in a world that is increasingly more complex and hostile.

A star is born in a time of both celebration and instability in this historical drama with music from director Christophe Barratier. In the spring of 1936, Paris is in a state of uncertainty; while the rise of the Third Reich in Germany worries many, a leftist union-oriented candidate, Léon Blum, has been voted into power, and organized labor is feeling its new power by standing up to management.

Felix Grandet reigns supreme in his modest house in Saumur where his wife and daughter Eugenie lead a distraction-free existence. Extremely avaricious, he does not take a favorable view of the beautiful parties who rush to ask for his daughter's hand. Nothing should damage the colossal fortune he hides from everyone. The sudden arrival of Grandet's nephew, an orphaned and ruined Parisian dandy, turns the young girl's life upside down.

Serge Tanneur (Fabrice Luchini) is at the pinnacle of his acting career when he decides to turn his back on show business and become a hermit living off of France’s Atlantic coast. Three years later, Gauthier Valence (Lambert Wilson), a beloved TV actor, shows up on the island to offer Serge a role in his directorial debut – a rendition of Molière’s classic play, “The Misanthrope”. Serge refuses at first, but then suggests that they rehearse the first scene and after five days he’ll decide if he wants to dothe play or not. What ensues is a battle of brawn and wits and peculiar encounters with a hotel maid who longs to be a pornstar and an Italian divorcée.

In 1850, on the isolated French island of Saint-Pierre, a murder shocks the natives. Two fishermen are arrested. One of them, Louis Ollivier, dies in custody. The other, Neel Auguste, is sentenced to death by the guillotine. The island is so small that it has neither a guillotine nor an executioner. While those are sent for Auguste is placed under the supervision of an army Captain.

Herve, the head of a press agency, is traveling fast down a road headed in only one direction: self-destruction. He is an alcoholic, and his drinking is wrecking his marriage, family and career. In desperation and still in denial, he checks into a detox clinic in Geneva, his last-chance saloon. There he meets a group of fellow sufferers and one person in particular, a young woman named Magali, who help him to see life other than through the bottom of an empty bottle.