Showing results by author "Sam Taylor" in All Categories

As dawn breaks over the city of Florence on New Year's Day 1557, Jacopo da Pontormo is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him are the frescoes he labored over for more than a decade―masterpieces all, rivaling the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. When guards search his quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid―with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria de' Medici, the Duke of Florence's oldest daughter. The city erupts in chaos.

When Myriam decides to return to work as a lawyer after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their son and daughter. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family’s chic Paris apartment, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment, and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau.

Adèle appears to have the perfect life. A respected journalist, she lives in a flawless Parisian apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But beneath the veneer of "having it all", she is bored - and consumed by an insatiable need for sex, whatever the cost. Struggling to contain the twin forces of compulsion and desire, she begins to orchestrate her life around her one-night stands and extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she’s been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making.

After World War II, Mathilde leaves France for Morocco to be with her husband, whom she met while he was fighting for the French army. A spirited young woman, she now finds herself a farmer’s wife, her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. But she refuses to be subjugated or confined to her role as mother of a growing family.

Freydis is the leader of a band of Viking warriors who get as far as Panama. Nobody knows what became of them. Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even after he is captured by the Tainos, his faith in his superiority and his mission is unshaken. Thirty-nine years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe.

It’s the 1960s, and the air is electric. On the cusp of adulthood, two biracial siblings—their father is Moroccan, their mother French—search for their place in a newly independent Morocco brimming with both possibility and peril. Aicha, strong-willed and strait-laced, aspires to become a doctor and spends most of her time studying. Her free-spirited younger brother, Selim, falls in with the American and European hippies descending en masse on Tangier and Casablanca and Essaouira to do drugs and practice free love.

Alice, a fierce and respected Parisian cop, wakes up on a Central Park bench with no memory of the night before, handcuffed to a complete stranger - a musician named Gabriel. Disoriented, dazed, and with someone else’s blood on her shirt, Alice works furiously to reconnect the dots. She remembers clubbing with her friends the night before on the Champs-Élysées. Gabriel claims he was playing a gig in Dublin. Was she drugged? Kidnapped? Why is the gun in her jacket pocket missing a bullet? And whose blood is on her clothes?

Before Picasso became Picasso—the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France's leading figures—he was constantly surveilled by the police. Amidst political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services. Though he soon became the leader of the cubist avant-garde, and became increasingly wealthy as his reputation grew worldwide, Picasso's art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades.

When the fakir - a professional con artist - arrives in Paris, he has just one goal: to get to Ikea. Armed with only a counterfeit hundred-euro note in the pocket of his silk trousers, he is confident that he has all he needs to thrive. But his plan goes horribly awry when he hides inside a wardrobe at the iconic Swedish retailer - the first in a series of accidents that will send him on a whirlwind tour across Europe.

Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman’s name: Maram. The key to this mysterious woman’s identity is Adanson’s unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant.

Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies - struck by a laundry van - after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn't an accident at all? What if Barthes was murdered?

Maddi Libéri is a successful doctor living an idyllic life in the South of France. On the morning of her son’s tenth birthday, they walk to the beach together. The boy presses for a quick swim, but when the surf is too rough, she sends him off to buy a baguette instead.

On the night of 22 December 1980, a plane crashes on the Franco-Swiss border and is engulfed in flames. Out of 169 passengers. 168 are killed instantly. The miraculous sole survivor is a newborn baby. But the identity of the child is unknown, and two families - one rich and affluent, and the other poor - step forward to claim her. So begins a private investigation that wil go on for the next 18 years.... The novel opens on the eve of the girl's 18th birthday.

Eugene and Tatiana could have fallen in love, if things had gone differently. If they had tried to really know each other, if it had just been them, and not the others. But that was years ago and time has found them far apart, leading separate lives. Until they meet again in Paris.

On the big screen, Mia plays a woman in love. But in real life, she's an actress in need of a break from her real-life philandering husband - the megastar who plays her romantic interest in the movies. So she heads across the English Channel to hide in Paris behind a new haircut, fake eyeglasses, and a waitressing job at her best friend's restaurant.

Beleaguered Captain Katel Marelle hopes for an open-and-shut case while investigating a death in the rugged French Ardennes. But an apparent suicide turns vastly more complicated when three IDs are pulled from the glove box of the deceased’s car. Renaud Duval, Pierre Rousseau, Hans Bernard—three men with the same face but different birthplaces. Marelle has her work cut out for her, figuring out not only how the man died but who he really was.

Is it true that every life is the stuff of novels? Or are some people just too ordinary? This is the question a struggling Parisian writer asks when he challenges himself to write about the first person he sees when he steps outside his apartment. Secretly hoping to meet the beautiful woman who occasionally smokes on his street, he instead sets eyes on octogenarian Madeleine. She’s happy to become his subject, but first she needs to put her shopping away. Wondering if his project is doomed to be hopelessly banal, he soon finds himself tangled in the lives of Madeleine’s family.

Welcome to One Thing about Us, a show about 2 twenty-somethings balancing their life while learning and laughing on the way. Think of it like catching up with an old friend on FaceTime, or a girls chit chat over brunch and mimosas. Come along on our journey of personal growth, leveling up our lifestyle, enjoying city life, and feeling our best, with a little bit of chaos along the way. Wellness advice? Pop Culture? Fashion? Crazy party stories? You name it, we cover it. One thing about us, we LOVE to talk. So look forward to new episodes every Wednesday Keep up with us on socials: @...

Four-year-old Malone Moulin is haunted by nightmares of being handed over to a complete stranger and begins claiming his mother is not his real mother. His teachers at school say that it is all in his imagination as his mother has a birth certificate, photos of him as a child, and even the pediatrician confirms Malone is her son. The school psychologist, Vasily, believes otherwise as the child vividly describes an exchange between two women. Convinced that Malone is telling the truth, Vasile approaches Police Commander Marianne Augresse with the case.

Seventeen-year-old Leo is sitting in an empty playground at night, listening to the sound of partying and pop music filtering in from the beach, when he sees another, more popular boy strangle himself with the ropes of the swings. Then, in a panic, Leo drags him to the beach and buries him. Over the next 24 hours, Leo wanders around the campsite like a sleepwalker, haunted by guilt and fear, and distracted by his desire for a girl named Luce.