"Actor: Edouard Baer"

• Moliere | DVD | (12/11/2007) from £2.99   |  Saving you £17.00 (568.56%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Laurent Tirard's sumptuous and seductive comedy provides a fictionalised account of the mysterious 'lost months' in the celebrated playwright's life.

• Betty Fisher And Other Stories | DVD | (28/10/2002) from £2.79   |  Saving you £17.20 (616.49%)   |  RRP £19.99

  With Betty Fisher and Other Stories, writer-director Claude Miller follows the examples of Claude Chabrol and Pedro Almodóvar in adapting a Ruth Rendell novel to the screen. In this case the original novel, The Tree of Hands, has been translated seamlessly and stylishly to a Parisian setting. The plot interweaves a complexity of characters and stories, but the central thread concerns the eponymous Betty, a novelist whose young son dies while her disturbed mother Margot is staying with her. Margot, with terrifying directness, calmly abducts another child of similar age to replace the dead boy. From this loopy act there stems a whole series of consequences and side-effects involving a widening and socially diverse circle of people across the city. Miller lucidly traces his way through the intricate story with cool, ironic humour and a sure touch for the different social milieus. Once or twice the plot strains credulity--bringing three major characters together by chance for the showdown at Charles de Gaulle airport is just a little too convenient--but most of the time the social and emotional cross-currents are deftly navigated. As Betty, Sandrine Kiberlain gives an almost painfully vulnerable performance, as if she lacks several layers of skin, while Nicole Garcia makes her mother Margot into a monster of overriding, self-pitying egomania. Their scenes together carry the weight of a whole lifetime of ill-suppressed mutual aversion. As with Rendell's novels, it's endlessly fascinating to watch these people, but you feel very glad you don’t know them. --Philip Kemp

• God Is Great | DVD | (18/02/2008) from £3.49   |  Saving you £14.50 (80.60%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Michele a 20 year old model meets Francois a jewish veterinarian. She decides to convert into Judaism because she has to believe in something if not in someone.

• Dieu Est Grand, Je Suis Toute Petite | DVD | (08/05/2006) from £8.53   |  Saving you £1.46 (14.60%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Mich''le (Amelie's Audrey Tautou) is a 20-year-old tornado. With a bouncing perfectly round Afro and a job posing for fashion photography she boldly describes herself as a top model though her miniature physical size and girlish grin reveals her subdued searching interior. Overloaded with passion and personality she seeks a way to channel her spirituality into an identity. Buddhism works. So does Judaism when she falls for Fran''ois (Edouard Baer) a Jewish veterinarian. Her insistence that Fran''ois prove his religious faith to her by observing Shabbat and obeying other rules causes him a lot of grief. But he adoringly complies. God Is Great And I'm Not follows Mich''le over a three-year period via the impulsive and always poetic exclamations she writes in her diary. The film shows how her aggressive attitude towards her family Fran''ois and all those she holds dear sometimes alienates her. She demands a lot of other people--mainly that they live life with all the zest with which she has chosen to live her own and sometimes those demands backfire on her. An intense and beautiful film fuelled by a powerful performance by Tautou and an inspired script from director Pascale Bailly.