With bills to pay and a daughter to support, Juan Villegas is desperately in need of a job.  Unfortunately, at age 52, and without any marketable skills, gainful employment seems unlikely.  His luck changes when he helps a woman repair her car and she repays his kindness by giving him a pure-bred puppy.  Convinced of his future in the competitive dog circuit, Villegas seeks out the help of dog trainer Walter Donado and the two take their fortunes on the road.

In October 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Alex Kerner (Daniel Brühl) is living with his mother, Christiane (Kathrin Sass), and sister, Ariane (Maria Simon).  But when the mother, a loyal party member, sees Alex participating in an anti-communist rally, she falls into a coma and misses the revolution.  After she wakes, doctors say any jarring event could make her have a heart attack, meaning the family must go to great lengths to pretend communism still reigns in Berlin.

Arguably Luchino Visconti’s best film and certainly the most personal of his historical epics, The Leopard chronicles the fortunes of Prince Fabrizio Salina and his family during the unification of Italy in the 1860s.  Based on the acclaimed novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the picture opens as Salina (Burt Lancaster) learns that Garibaldi’s troops have embarked in Sicily.  While the Prince sees the event as an obvious threat to his current social status, his opportunistic nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) becomes an officer in Garibaldi’s army and returns home a war hero and begins courting the beautiful Angelica (Claudia Cardinale).

Magic tricks can’t compete with rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, so a French illusionist finds himself touring Scotland’s shabby pubs and run-down restaurants.  But things brighten for him when he meets Alice, a girl who believes his powers are real.  Together they travel to Edinburgh for a performance, but he doesn’t have the heart to reveal that his feats are merely tricks, and risks financial ruin by giving her gifts supplied by his “magic.”  Superb animated feature based on an unproduced script by Jacques Tati.

In this visually and conceptually impressive film, two-bit Berlin criminal Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) delivers some smuggled loot for his boss, Ronnie (Heino Ferch), but accidentally leaves the 100,000 Deutschmark payment in a subway car.  Given twenty minutes to come up with the money, he calls his girlfriend, Lola (Franka Potente), who sprints through the streets of the city to try to beg the money out of her bank manager father (Herbert Knaup) and get to Manni before he does something desperate.

An order of Trappist monks whose members include Christian (Lambert Wilson) and Luc (Michael Lonsdale) live among the Muslim population in a quiet corner of Algeria.  As the country is plunged into civil war in the mid-1990s, the men of God must decide whether to stay among the impoverished residents who have been their neighbours, or flee the encroaching fundamentalist terrorists.  The situation that unfolds, based on actual events, has tragic consequences.

Physics professor Larry Gopnik can’t believe his life.  His wife is leaving him for his best friend.  His unemployed brother won’t move off the couch.  Someone is threatening his career.  His kids are a mystery and his neighbour is tormenting him by sunbathing nude.  Struggling to make sense of it all, Larry consults three different rabbis and their answers lead him on a twisted journey of faith, family and mortality.

Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve), a beautiful young Frenchwoman who works at a small-town boutique selling umbrellas, falls for dashing mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuovo).  Their brief romance is interrupted when Guy is drafted to serve in the Algerian War.  Though pregnant by Guy, Geneviève marries an older businessman, Roland (Marc Michel), and begins to move on with her life. Throughout the film, all the characters’ dialogue is conveyed through song.  Music by Michel Legrand.