The best Philippe Laudenbach’s movies

A lackadaisical handyman and aspiring novelist tries to support his younger girlfriend as she slowly succumbs to madness.

French drama based on the 1996 kidnapping and killing of seven monks in Algeria. A group of Trappist monks reside in the monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria, where they live in harmony with the largely muslim population. When a bloody conflict between Algeria's army and Muslim Jihadi insurgents disrupts the peace, they are forced to consider fleeing the monastery and deserting the villagers they have ministered to. In the face of deadly violence the monks wrestle with their faith and their convictions, eventually deciding to stay and help their neighbours keep the army and the insurgents at bay.

Suzanne is a well to do married woman and mother in the south of France. Her idle bourgeois lifestyle gets her down and she decides to go back to work as a physiotherapist. Her husband agrees to fix up a consulting room for her in their backyard. When Suzanne and the man hired to do the building meet, the mutual attraction is sudden and violent. Suzanne decides to give up everything and live this all engulfing passion to the fullest.

What happens when a man and a woman share a common passion? They fall in love. And this is what happens to Jean-René, the boss of a small chocolate factory, and Angélique, a gifted chocolate maker he has just hired. What occurs when a highly emotional man meets a highly emotional woman? They fall in love, and this is what occurs to Jean-René and Angélique who share the same handicap. But being pathologically timid does not make things easy for them. So whether they will manage to get together, join their solitudes and live happily ever after is a guessing matter.

The unsanctioned efforts of a covert unit to gather evidence about illegal arms shipments with the unwitting help of an embassy employee.

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.

Claude Massoulier is murdered while hunting at the same place as Julien Vercel, an estate agent who knew him and whose fingerprints are found on Massoulier's car. As the police discover that Marie-Christine Vercel, Julien's wife, was Massoulier's mistress, Julien is the prime suspect. But his secretary, Barbara Becker, while not quite convinced he is innocent, defends him and leads her private investigations.

A woman at the age of 50 moves back in with her parents after her husband leave her for a younger woman.

In a penitentiary, four prisoners occupy a cell: Carrère, who used his company to commit a fraud and was betrayed by his wife; the drag Marcus and his protégée, the retarded Paquerette, who ate his six month old sister; and the intellectual, Lassalle who killed his wife. One night, Carrère finds an ancient journal hidden in a hole in the wall of the cell. They realize that the book was written by Danvers in the beginning of the last century and is about black magic. They decide to read and use its content to escape from the prison, when they find the truth about Danvers' fate.

A mature podiatrist, his girlfriend and her teenage children travel Ibiza to live a crazy holidays.

Two young girls meet, Reinette from the countryside and Mirabelle from Paris, and decide to take a flat together in Paris where they attend University. Four successive stories about their daily lives illustrate the very different views, characters and relation to the world of these two friends.

On his 50th birthday, a man who's been watching his weight, health and temper all his life suffers a heart attack. He's been doing everything he was told he should do and it still didn't help. He decides to turn the page and let loose.

Winemaker son, Charlie Marshall left Burgundy to become a Parisian renowned winemaker, author of a successful guide whose notes are annually tremble vineyards. But in Côte-d'Or, his father lost the taste of wine and mistakes the family winery rush towards bankruptcy. At first reluctant, Charlie returns to Burgundy. It must his boots and shoes back up his sleeves and become winemaker confront a profession he does not know, under the skeptical gaze of his father. Between unpredictable weather and a delicate variety, Charlie will have to prove to his father that he is worthy of this land passed from generation to generation in their family. It is easy to note a wine, but how do we do a great wine?

A chamber drama about a widow and her son who live in an antique shop in Boulogne. The widow invites a man whom she loved twenty-two years earlier to visit. Her son is haunted by Muriel, a young woman whose death he may have caused while serving as a soldier in Algeria. As in Resnais' earlier films, memory is deflected, fragmented, enshrined, and imagined.

Paris, June 1940. The de Gaulle couple is confronted with the military and political collapse of France. Charles de Gaulle joins London while Yvonne, his wife, finds herself with her three children on the road of the exodus.

Vigilante, a small armored truck company, is in full crisis mode. Victim of three violent hold-ups in a year, which left no survivors, the company is on the verge of bankruptcy and its employees are extremely worried. Some even suggest a complicity between the robbers and the firm. It is in this difficult context that a man, Alexandre Demarre, one morning presents himself to start his first day of work at Vigilante.

In this whimsical fable, Resnais deftly interweaves three story lines: the creation of an early-20th-century utopia; romantic high jinks at a school conference; and a fantasy sparked by F/X pioneer Georges Méliès.

Since Charlie is no longer there, the lives of Boris, Elie, and Maxime have been torn apart. These three men, who have nothing in common, all shared one thing: their love for Charlie. One loved her like a sister, one loved her like the woman of his dreams, one loved her like a friend. Except that Charlie is dead and none of them - not Boris, an accomplished businessman, not Elie, a night owl scriptwriter, and not Maxime, still living at home with his mother - know how to deal with it. But because she asked them to do so, they abruptly decide to undertake a journey together, heading for Corsica and the house that Charlie loved so much. Except that here they are stuck in a car together for over 500 miles. It's going to be a long journey. Boris, Elie and Maxime, three men, three generations, no affinity. But by the time they arrive at their destination, they will have realized one majorly important thing: Charlie has changed their lives forever.

Trapped in an old folks home where people keep going missing, an ex-cop must overcome his Alzheimers to find out who is killing people in this jigsaw thriller.