Boris Bergman Movies

A daring band of rebels takes on Nazi forces in Europe in this wartime drama from director Robert Guédiguian. Born in Armenia, Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian) had settled in France by the time World War II broke out; a Socialist who stood in fierce opposition to the Axis forces occupying his country, he and a handful of other leftists formed the FTP-MOI, a faction of the French Resistance comprised of immigrants who came to France before the war. Working beside Manouchian was his wife, Mélinée (Virginie Ledoyen), a poet-turned-underground fighter; Marcel (Robinson Stévenin), a Jewish volunteer who is an excellent shot with a rifle; and Thomas (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), a passionate Marxist with a skill for making bombs. Along with several other activists, the FTP-MOI wage a propaganda campaign against the Nazis while targeting selected Axis leaders for execution. But despite their cunning and talent, Manouchian and his partners find it difficult to keep their work a secret, and in time they're found out by a ruthless detective (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) with the Vichy police. L'Armée du Crime (aka The Army of Crime) was based on the true story of a French resistance group dubbed "the Army of Crime" in Vichy propaganda pieces. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Valentin (also known as And Now...Ladies and Gentleman) is directed by Claude Lelouch and features Jeremy Irons as Valentin, a criminal mastermind whose jewel-stealing business, despite having made him rich, does not offer him much room for personal growth. Hoping to find meaning for his existence, Valentin buys a boat and sets off on a one-man sailing trip around the world, with the police at his heels. At the same time, a burned-out jazz singer named Jane (Patricia Kaas) is in Morocco trying to forget an ill-fated love affair. Valentin, after being struck by a serious illness, makes an emergency landing on the Moroccan coast. Jane soon crosses paths with the suave con artist, and they begin a relationship. Valentin, filmed in France, England, and Morocco, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002. The supporting cast of Valentin includes Xavier Lecoeur, Romula Walker, and Laura Mayne-Kerbrat. ~ Tracie Cooper, Rovi

Tensions run high when a recently-divorced couple are given an offer they can't refuse. Once well-established movie songwriters, Dempsey and Ringwald are thrown together again when a movie producer offers them a rewarding contract to compose a new song. However, old wounds and new love interests guarantee that this job will be anything but easy money. ~ Iotis Erlewine, Rovi

In this caper comedy, Gilbert was young once, though one would never know it to see him now. He is middle-aged, middle-class, and has an extremely boring job through which he supports his wife and child. It's a pretty odd job, though: he operates the incinerator in the basement of his bank which destroys old, soiled bank notes. That's hard, cold cash to everyone else. Then Serge, a childhood buddy, shows up, Serge was also in a rock band with Gilbert but has now become pretty much a full-time scoundrel. The nature of Gilbert's job leads the old buddy to try and ensnare Gilbert in a scheme to make off with millions of untraceable bills. Unfortunately for Serge, he just can't keep his mitts off of anything, including Gilbert's wife. When Gilbert finds out about it, this throws a big monkeywrench into their theft plans. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

When a man decides to play the role of twins in order to romance another set of twins, life becomes much more complicated than he wants or needs in this interesting farce by Yves Robert, adapted from the much blacker comedy by Donald Westlake, Two Much. Matthias Duval (Pierre Richard) is a humble greeting-card vendor when he meets twin American heiresses and decides to seduce each of them since he cannot tell them apart anyway and is attracted to both sisters. His originally innocent ploy eventually makes a bigamist out of him and nearly does him in since he has to bed-hop between the two women, without remembering who is whom. The sisters' dirty-dealing lawyer finds Matthias out one day, and in the subsequent fight Matthias accidentally kills the man. Will this affect Matthias's relationship with both sisters? Will he be caught and go to jail? -- the answers are unexpected. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Directors Jean-Henri Roger and Juliet Berto begin this thriller with sequences on the contemporary politics of southern France and the infiltration of organized crime into real estate development there -- the crime bosses were torching forest tracts to make way for their development schemes in the early 1980s. In the fictionalized story, Paula Barretto (Juliet Berto) is caught in this underworld because her father was involved in the drug business, her brother is in the real estate scam, and her lover is an armed thief. Although she tries to get out of her corrupt and dangerous environment, it is not an easy task when even the police officers cannot be trusted, and the underworld has informants everywhere. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

A man is left grieving for his dead family after they were shot down in a train station, innocent bystanders to a robbery gone wrong. They were never vindicated since the police seem unable (if not reluctant) to solve the case. Driven in part because he survived and they did not, and frustrated with the inept police, the man starts his own investigation with the aid of a right-wing organization that advocates citizens' militias. He discovers that a woman who also survived the train-station massacre has a brother with blood on his hands -- he is clearly the mastermind behind the "robbery" killings -- staged to effect the politically-motivated assassination of one particular man. He and the woman join ranks to bring the brother to justice, but soon they themselves are being hunted down because they know too much. The right-wing group comes on the scene again, catalyzing a final showdown that seems inevitable from the beginning. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Therese, Catherine, and Alain (Carole Laure, Brigitte Fossey, and Bernard Giraudeau) are three friends who undergo several personal trials and tribulations over an eight-year period in which all three try to hang on to their original visions of who they are and what they want out of life. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi