Old movies pieces of art

In this adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel, avant-garde composer Gustav von Aschenbach (Sir Dirk Bogarde) travels to a Venetian seaside resort seeking repose after a period of artistic and personal stress. But he finds no peace there, for he soon develops a troubling attraction to Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), an adolescent on vacation with his family. The boy embodies an ideal of beauty that Aschenbach has long sought and he becomes infatuated. However, the onset of a deadly pestilence threatens them physically and represents the corruption that compromises and threatens all ideals.

Charlotte is young and modern, not a hair out of place, superficial, cool; she reads fashion magazines - does she have the perfect bust? She lives in a Paris suburb with her son and her husband Pierre, a pilot. Her lover is Robert, an actor. Assignations with him, dinner with her husband and a client, consulting a physician: there's tension at home, Pierre had her followed a few months before, their marital play has an edge, Pierre slaps her and apologizes. She quizzes Robert: is he acting when he's with her? Events may force her to choose Robert or Pierre. Close-ups fill the screen; is there more than surface? Her eyes tear up. The horrors of war provide a distant counterpoint.

When an African dictator jails her husband, Shandurai goes into exile in Italy, studying medicine and keeping house for Mr. Kinsky, an eccentric English pianist and composer. She lives in one room of his Roman palazzo. He besieges her with flowers, gifts, and music, declaring passionately that he loves her, would go to Africa with her, would do anything for her. "What do you know of Africa?," she asks, then, in anguish, shouts, "Get my husband out of jail!" The rest of the film plays out the implications of this scene and leaves Shandurai with a choice.

Paul is young, just demobbed from national service in the French Army, and disillusioned with civilian life. As his girlfriend builds herself a career as a pop singer, Paul becomes more isolated from his friends and peers ('the children of Marx and Coca Cola', as the credits announce) and their social and emotional politics.

Sometimes, solemn but somehow empty vows of love and devotion are just not good enough, and a simple "I love you" may prove to be insufficient. As a result, Angela, a tall, slender, and graceful exotic dancer, has set her sights on talking her unwilling lover, Émile, into starting a family; however, he seems absorbed with his other passion: cycling. But, Angela wants a child, and she takes no for an answer. Could Alfred Lubitsch, a handsome neighbour and Émile's bosom friend, lend a hand? And, what happens when a pressing demand turns into a misunderstanding, and love transforms into jealousy?

In pre-WWI Paris, two friends, Jules (Austrian) and Jim (French), fall in love with the same woman, Catherine. But Catherine loves and marries Jules. When they meet again in Germany after the war, Catherine starts to love Jim - This is the story of three people in love, a love that doesn't affect their friendship, and about how their relationship evolves with the years.

Tomas is a doctor and a lady-killer in 1960s Czechoslovakia, an apolitical man who is struck with love for the bookish country girl Tereza; his more sophisticated sometime lover Sabina eventually accepts their relationship and the two women form an electric friendship. The three are caught up in the events of the Prague Spring (1968), until the Soviet tanks crush the non-violent rebels; their illusions are shattered and their lives change forever.

1968 and 1969 in Paris during and after the student and trade-union revolt. 20-year-old François is a poet dodging military service. He takes to the barricades, but won't throw a Molotov cocktail at the police. He smokes opium and talks about revolution with his friend Antoine, who has an inheritance and a flat where François can stay. François meets Lilie, a sculptor who works at a foundry to support herself, and they fall in love. A year passes; François continues to write, talk, smoke, and be with Lilie. Opportunities come to Lilie: what will she and François do?

Jose Luis is an executive at his parents underwear factory where his girlfriend Sylvia works on the shop floor. When Sylvia falls pregnant, Jose Luis promises her that he will marry her, most likely against the wishes of his parents. Jose Luis' mother is determined to break her son's engagement to a girl from a lower-class family, and hires Raul, a potential underwear model and would-be bullfighter to seduce Sylvia.

Parma, 1962. Balancing between his Marxist ideology and his forced integration into the system, the twenty-year-old student, Fabrizio, is both repelled and attracted by his parents' bourgeois way of life. Still unable to come to terms with the untimely demise of a dear friend, and while preparing for his marriage to his statuesque and affluent but apolitical girlfriend, Clelia, Fabrizio finds himself distracted after the sudden arrival of the refined but troubled Milanese Aunt Gina. Now, confused, Fabrizio has no other choice but to give in to lust. Will Fabrizio embrace fate and his predestined ordinary life?

In Paris, Alexandre, an unemployed young man with memories of the May 1968 events in France, attempts to persuade his former love, Gilberte, to marry him. Gilberte opts to instead marry another man. Alexandre is involved with a live-in girlfriend called Marie, and is interested in films such as The Working Class Goes to Heaven. One day, after an unsuccessful reconciliation with Gilberte at the highly popular Les Deux Magots café, he meets Veronika, a Polish French twenty-something nurse. In the midst of the sexual revolution, Veronika is highly promiscuous, and begins to make advances on Alexandre. During the summer of 1972, Alexandre and Marie are nude in bed in their apartment when Veronika visits. Marie lets her in and Veronika insults both of them, but acknowledges she is not pure herself. The three begin a ménage à trois and sleep in the same bed, with Veronika assuring Alexandre she and Marie both love him, and telling him to be more happy with his situation and life. Although Marie affirms her indifference to Alexandre's affairs, she quickly changes her mind when she sees how close he becomes to Veronika. This leads to a growing estrangement between her and Alexandre. As the three sit together, Veronika attempts to reassure Marie about her looks and body. Tearfully, Veronika speaks about how she believes no women are truly whores, and how love is meaningless unless it produces a child.

Zorg is a handyman working at the seaside in France, maintaining and looking after the wooden bungalows. He lives a quiet and peaceful life, working diligently and writing in his spare time. He is in love with Betty, a young woman who is as beautiful as she is wild and unpredictable. After a dispute with Zorg's boss, they leave and Betty finds a place to stay at her girlfriend's house. The girlfriend's lover owns an Italian restaurant and there they find a job. She is obsessed to try to get one of Zorg's books published, but it is rejected, which makes Betty fly into a rage. Suddenly, Betty's wild manners start to get out of control. Zorg sees the woman he loves slowly going insane. Is his love for Betty strong enough, if even if it comes to the worst?

Just after boarding a train, much to the surprise of his fellow passengers, a man pours a bucket of water over a young girl on the platform. Over the next few hours he explains (and we see in flashback) how he became obsessed by her (so much so that he failed to notice that she was played by two different actresses, representing different sides of her personality), and how she tantalised him, but would never allow him to satisfy his desire for her...

Humbert Humbert forces a confrontation with a man, whose name he has just recently learned, in this man's home. The events that led to this standoff began four years earlier. Middle aged Humbert, a European, arrives in the United States where he has secured at job at Beardsley College in Beardsley, Ohio as a Professor of French Literature. Before he begins his post in the fall, he decides to spend the summer in the resort town of Ramsdale, New Hampshire. He is given the name of Charlotte Haze as someone who is renting a room in her home for the summer. He finds that Charlotte, widowed now for seven years, is a woman who puts on airs. Among the demonstration of those airs is throwing around the name of Clare Quilty, a television and stage script writer, who came to speak at her women's club meeting and who she implies is now a friend. Those airs also mask being lonely, especially as she is a sexually aggressive and liberated woman. Humbert considers Charlotte a proverbial "joke" but decides to rent the room upon meeting Charlotte's provocative daughter, Dolores Haze - more frequently referred to as Lolita - who he first spots in a bikini tanning in the back yard. He is immediately infatuated with Lolita, with who he becomes obsessed in a sexual manner despite her age, she being just into her teens. He will also learn that Charlotte has the exact same feelings for him. While Charlotte does whatever she can to be alone with Humbert, Humbert does the same with Lolita. As the summer progresses, Humbert, based on the circumstances, decides to enter into a relationship with Charlotte just to be near Lolita. In that new arrangement, Humbert has to figure out how to achieve his goal of being with Lolita with Charlotte out of the way. As things begin to go Humbert's way, he is unaware that Charlotte is not the only thing standing in his way between him and Lolita, that other thing being Lolita's possible interest in other boys, and other members of the male sex, young or old, who may have their own designs on Lolita.

Paul Javal is a writer who is hired to make a script for a new movie about Ulysses more commercial, which is to be directed by Fritz Lang and produced by Jeremy Prokosch. But because he let his wife Camille drive with Prokosch and he is late, she believes, he uses her as a sort of present for Prokosch to get get a better payment. So the relationship ends.

Paris by night. Alex, 22, wants to become a filmmaker. He is fascinated by first times and his girlfriend, Florence, has just left him for his best friend, Thomas. First break-up, first attempted murder: Alex tries to strangle Thomas, but gives up and wanders the streets. That evening, Mireille, a girl from provincial France who has come up to Paris to make commercials, is left by her boyfriend. Alex witnesses this separation. These two tormented souls run into each other at a party....

While looking for an apartment, Jeanne, a beautiful young Parisienne, encounters Paul, a mysterious American expatriate mourning his wife's recent suicide. Instantly drawn to each other, they have a stormy, passionate affair, in which they do not reveal their names to each other. Their relationship deeply affects their lives, as Paul struggles with his wife's death and Jeanne prepares to marry her fiance, Tom, a film director making a cinema-verite documentary about her.

Argentine Manuela Echevarria, an organ transplant coordinator at a Madrid hospital, ran off from her husband in Barcelona eighteen years ago upon learning that she was pregnant, their son, Esteban, who she has never told about his father despite his curiosity, and her husband who didn't know about the pregnancy when she ran off. An event coinciding with Esteban, an aspiring writer, turning seventeen leads to Manuela feeling the need to return to Barcelona to look for her husband. There, she ends up further acting as the maternal figure for people in need. One is a young nun named Sister Rosa, who she meets through her old friend, a transvestite prostitute who has assumed the name Agrado in her agreeable nature. Rosa has a strained relationship with her own conservative mother, as she is consumed with caring for her ill husband, who suffers from Alzheimer's. The other is actress Huma Rojo, currently appearing as Blanche Dubois in a stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which has long been a touchstone for Manuela in productions of it coinciding with milestone moments in her life, this production no different. Huma is in a troubled codependent relationship with her younger "Stella Kowalski" costar Nina Cruz, a closet junkie, hence Huma's emotional need for support. By the end of her stay in Barcelona, Manuela will have another non-relative for who she will feel the need to act as a mother figure.