Jean-Joachim Goriot, a merchant who got rich during the Revolution, is obsessed with the love of his two daughters, whose social promotion he wants. He endows them richly, ruins himself to pay their debts, but Delphine and Anastasie do not return his affection and abandon him at the time of his death to run to a big ball.

After getting screwed over by life (again), two losers decide that enough is enough. Using stolen ski masks and stolen toy guns, they take hostages in their local bank, holding them for ransom. Things go well until the hostages learn what's going on, and demand a piece of the action for themselves.

Nobles try desperately to cling to the crumbling aristocracy in the days following World War I. The Count (Jean-Claude Brialy) and his Countess Mahe (Sylvia Fennec) delight in throwing lavish costume balls. The couple develops a friendship with a young boy who delights in the parties thrown by the noble couple. Love soon blooms between the Countess and the boy as she searches for something more than a string of endless parties and social affairs. The masquerades are an attempt to freeze time and hold on to the nostalgia of a bygone era. For fear of losing her, the Count allows the Countess to continue her love affair.

Albert is a Franciscan monk and a medical orderly at a monastery in France. Although he is German, the kindly monk helps hide French resistance members. Albert tries to maintain the delicate balance between the warring factions by helping out the afflicted and not getting involved in political ideology.

Adaptation of the famous novel, impassioned denunciation of the Guatemalan dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera.

A writer of pulpy book series in which he's the hero and his beautiful English roommate is the love interest attempts to finish his new book in time at the publisher's demand.

Lucien Leuwen, a young polytechnic student from a bourgeois family, is expelled from school after being suspected of being a Saint-Simonian. His father, a very wealthy businessman in Paris, allows him to become a sub-lieutenant, which leads him to move to Nancy. There he meets Madame de Chasteller, a young and charming widow with whom he falls in love.