Movies: Jean Cocteau

Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the...

The story of a gentle-hearted beast in love with a simple and beautiful girl. She is drawn to the repellent but strangely fascinating Beast, who tests her fidelity by giving her a key, telling her that if she doesn't return it to him by a specific ti...

Pepa resolves to kill herself with a batch of sleeping-pill-laced gazpacho after her lover leaves her. Fortunately, she is interrupted by a deliciously chaotic series of events....

Outside time and reality, the experiences of a poet. The judgement of the young poet by Heurtebise and the Princess, the Gypsies, the palace of Pallas Athena, the spear of the Goddess which pierces the poet's heart, the temptation of the Sphinx, the ...

A woman watches time pass beside the suitcases of her ex-lover (who is supposed to come pick them up but never arrives) and a restless dog who doesn't understand that his master has abandoned him....

A love story that follows the maneuverings of a society lady as she connives to initiate a scandalous affair between her aristocratic ex-lover and a prostitute....

A poet in love with Death follows his unhappy wife into the underworld....

Elisabeth and her brother Paul live isolated from much of the world after Paul is injured in a snowball fight. As a coping mechanism, the two conjure up a hermetic dream of their own making. Their relationship, however, isn't exactly wholesome. Jealo...

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas...

Told in four episodes, an unnamed artist is transported through a mirror into another dimension, where he travels through various bizarre scenarios....

Political intrigue and psychological drama run parallel. The queen is in seclusion, veiling her face for the ten years since her husband's assassination, longing to join him in death. Stanislas, a poet whose pen name is Azrael, is a suicidal anarchis...

When a young teen marries the Prince of Cleves, more than twice her age, she automatically becomes an official Princess and takes her new position to heart. Although distracted by the elite entertainments found at court, the princess cannot help but ...

L'Amore ('Love') is a 1948 Italian drama anthology film that consists of two parts, The Human Voice (Una voce umana), based on Jean Cocteau's 1929 play of the same title, and The Miracle (Il miracolo), based on Ramón del Valle-Inclán's 1904 novel Flo...

A retelling of Tristan and Isolde set in 1940s France....

In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the...

Young Michel is in love with the attractive Madeleine, so he decides to tell his parents of his intention to marry her. He thinks his announcement is innocent enough; his engagement, however, threatens to reveal dark secrets lurking within his family...

A man, mirroring the assassinated King, infiltrates a castle to kill the Queen but hesitates, leading to a deadly dare and revelation of shared history....

Exiled from the court of Spain, Don Salluste, the chief of police, wants to take revenge on the Queen. One day he meets Ruy Blas, a young student who happens to be a lookalike of Don Cesar, his nephew. Salluste disguises Ruy Blas and presents him as ...

Based on Jean Cocteau's iconic one-woman play of the same name; set against the backdrop of 1950 Naples, Angela is a woman in her twilight years, who rides the emotional rollercoaster of her last telephone conversation with the man she loves as he is...

In the First World War, when Paris is expected to fall to the Germans, the attractive widow, Princesse de Bormes, organises a convoy of cars to evacuate the wounded from the front, and bring them back to her villa in Paris to recuperate. The authorit...