Carole Laure Movies

In a mixture of French and English, this Canadian film tells the somewhat muddled story of a lad growing up in Montreal. Without many prospects, the boy is confused on the one hand by his virginal but fanatically separatist French-speaking girlfriend, and his goofy (but sexually available) English girlfriend who is a model. Somehow, this confusion later leads him to bank robbery. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Against the backdrop of impending war, an enterprising pimp and his seven working girls arrive in Borntown, northern Quebec, in the Christmas season of 1938. The entrepreneurs give a lavish reception right in the mine, which is the reason for the town's existence (and their presence). Afterwards, the usual difficulties of starting a new business come to the fore, with the additional difficulty of hell-and-brimstone sermons from the local priest (Jacques Dufilho). This film is in French. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Like his WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Dusan Makavejev's controversial 1974 feature Sweet Movie is firmly rooted in the principles of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. In cinematic terms, this means bombarding the audience with an onset of imagery so visceral, disgusting and repellent that it "awakens" the viewer in a Brechtian manner by "short-circuiting" the audience's reactions. Sweet Movie interweaves two narratives. One begins with a trip to the "Miss World Virginity Contest," whose winner, Miss Monde 1984 (Carole Laure) is auctioned off to Mr. Kapital (Animal House's John Vernon), a Texas oil billionaire with an odd perversion. Instead of deflowering her on her wedding night, he sterilizes the terrified girl's body with rubbing alcohol and showers her in urine with his massive gold-plated penis, while an audience watches bemusedly through his bedroom window. She later escapes from her bridegroom, in a suitcase, and winds up at a wild Viennese commune whose participants indulge in public defecation and a food orgy that wraps with a massive display of gurgling, yakking, and vomiting. At the tale's conclusion, Miss Monde shoots a television commercial that involves writhing nude in a giant vat of chocolate, with which she is completely drenched from head to toe, as the cameras roll. The second story involves a woman, Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal) piloting a candy-filled boat down a river, with a massive papier-mache head of Lenin on the prow and a lover in-tow who is a refugee from the Battleship Potemkin. She eventually does a seductive striptease and seduces a pack of children, then makes love to her paramour in a vat of sugar and stabs him through the heart. Throughout the film, Makavejev includes shock cuts to Nazi autopsy footage and medical experimentation footage, some of which involves physical abuse of infants under the guise of "baby gymnastics." Although it has its admirers, Sweet Movie is something of an acquired taste. And that's putting it kindly. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

In this violent actioner, a misanthropic Ottawa police captain searches for the person who poisoned his little sister, who was attending the university in Montreal. So desperate is he for vengeance that he casts protocol to the winds and begins using his own brutal methods to find the killer. Soon he discovers that his "innocent" kid sister was involved in the theft of a valuable string of pearls and that she had been hanging around an appalling assortment of creeps and weirdos. The story was originally titled Blazing Magnum. The new title has nothing to do with the film. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Unable to keep her social commentary to herself and concentrate solely on her show dancing, the girl in this film is shot to death in the Quebec woods by people who don't want propagandizing about Chile to be openly voiced. She is discovered by a mysterious stranger, who heals her wounds and reanimates her by blowing on them. After he takes her back to his cabin, they fall in love. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Bye, See You Monday is a wistful French/Canadian comedy of romance. Miou-Miou and Carole Laure star as a pair of attractive young housemates. Both ladies are involved with married men; both approach these delicate relationships in different fashion; and both learn a little something about what happens when one plays with fire. David Birney costars in this clever concoction. Bye, See You Monday, originally titled Au Revoir a Lundi, was filmed in 1979, but withheld from general release until 1981. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this drama, an actress in a traveling musical revue is involved with the show's director until she meets and falls for an aging ecological activist. He too is drawn to her, and together they try to stop a factory from being built over an old-growth forest. The ecologist suddenly runs away, frightened by his emotions for the woman. Broken-hearted but undaunted, the woman continues their fight. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

John Huston directed this exciting World War II action film, which culminates in a rousing soccer game. In a German prisoner of war camp, Major Karl von Steiner (Max Von Sydow), the camp commander, once a member of the German national soccer team, decides to put together a soccer match between a team of Allied prisoners, led by Captain John Colby (Michael Caine), a former English international soccer player. The game is to be played in Colombes Stadium in Paris and exploited for maximum propaganda effect by the Nazi publicity machine. Robert Hatch (Sylvester Stallone) is enlisted to assist the Allied prisoners to train for the event. But, in fact, the Allies are planning a risky escape during the soccer match. Famed Brazilian soccer great Pele makes an appearance in the film, along with Bobby Moore, the captain of Britain's 1966 World Cup champions, and Argentine soccer star Osvaldo Ardiles. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Pauline (Carole Laure), an attractive woman, becomes the obsession of a killer, Jacques (Richard Berry) who has murdered several women. He breaks into her apartment, makes her strip, does not touch her, and leaves. Ravic (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is the police inspector trying to track down the killer and when he sees Pauline, he develops an equally neurotic obsession for the woman. The two men, police inspector and criminal, are headed for a final show-down in Pauline's apartment, and only one of them will walk out alive. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Dirty Dishes is a Bunuel study in alienation, but look again: that's Joyce Bunuel, not Luis, so Dirty Dishes is more user-friendly. French housewife Carol Laure isn't satisfied with her lot, but what else is there? One day the monotony is too much; she snaps, and goes on a one-woman rebellion against the world. At first it's a hilarious orgy of self-discovery--and then Laure goes off the deep end. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This is a rather complex thriller that fails to deliver very much suspense or fear, in spite of the requisite shock scenes and mystery over who is perpetrating them. The story opens with a pending marriage, tragically aborted when the groom dies under suspicious circumstances, and continues several years later when Nathalie (Carole Laure), a single mother, receives "breather" phone calls and finds the bloody heart of an animal on her car seat. That is followed by another such donation sent to her workplace and labeled as the heart of her little daughter. Although gruesome, these incidents alone are not enough to create an atmosphere of foreboding, anxiety, or apprehension -- as Nathalie seems just a few steps from unconcerned. If she is not affected, any tension created by the scenario is diffused, leaving the audience in neutral. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Los Angeles is the playing field for producer/ writer/ director Bobby Roth's Heartbreakers. Peter Coyote and Nick Mancusco play a couple of thirty-something holdovers from the 1960s. Coyote is an artist specializing in S&M poses, while Mancusco is heir apparent to a large garment-manufacturing firm. Curiously, it is the hedonistic Coyote who desires a lasting relationship with a woman, while the "conservative" Mancusco is dedicated to the proposition of one-night stands. Carol Laure and Carol Wayne are the ladies who strain Coyote and Mancuso's friendship--and in so doing, force both arrested adolescents to do some growing up. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide