Silly and meandering, the film is a loose parody of ‘Citizen Kane’ and although for legal reasons it has never been sold on VHS or DVD, ‘Le Grand Détournement’ has slowly gathered a following, achieving cult-comedy status in France.

Slightly pompous preamble aside, this ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is pure joy, a self-conscious but never precious attempt to revisit childhood fantasies and half-remembered dreams. From nostalgic and subversive locals who capture the real essence of life in this miraculous city to wide-eyed foreign visitors riffing about what it is that makes it such a magnet for outsiders, these are the absolute best songs about Paris according to us. Young French economics student Xavier takes part in a European exchange programme in order to land his dream job. Antoine is an inept thief who winds up incarcerated; somehow, Truffaut turned this saga into one of the most joyous experiences you could ever have in the cinema. | WH, In 1959 François Truffaut, neglected son, passionate reader, delinquent student and cinephile, wrote and filmed one of the first glistening droplets of the French New Wave, ‘The 400 Blows’, in which Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) demonstrates – unforgettably – that a good brain and bad parents don’t necessarily turn a boy into a talented film director, although they will, one way or another, turn him into a liar. In a time of intolerance, protest and fevered passions, Robin Campillo’s glorious, moving memoir of his time in Aids activism group Act Up in ’90s Paris captures a sense of recurring zeitgeist: just swap in Extinction Rebellion to see how its story of politically engaged young people fearing for their futures still resonates. It’s a depiction of a French language teacher, François Marin, in a secondary school in Paris’s hard-scrabble 20th arrondissement that’s told with sympathy and compassion for adults and students alike. | It brings the film’s existential, melancholy mood to life like few thrillers before or since, and makes Malle’s gem of a film a must-hear as well as a must-see. No question of grace here, simply of grind and grime as four prisoners – joined and eventually betrayed by a fifth – laboriously tunnel their way to a derisory glimpse of freedom. Sabrina Seyvecou,

The situation is complicated by the constant interruptions of Jean’s beloved but irascible first mate Pére Jules (Michel Simon). The face we see most is, naturally, Falconetti’s as Joan, and it’s hard to imagine a performer evincing physical anguish and spiritual exaltation more palpably. Kassovitz has made only one film before (the droll race-comedy ‘Métisse’), but ‘La Haine’ puts him right at the front of the field: this is virtuosic, on-the-edge stuff, as exciting as anything we’ve seen from the States in ages, and more thoroughly engaged with the reality it describes. CC, A secular response to Bresson’s ‘A Man Escaped’. Loosely based on the life of its director Mia Hansen-Løve, Un Amour de Jeunesse is a provocative coming-of-age story that perfectly encapsulates the fragility and intensity associated with being in love for the very first time. We already have this email. Other good movies featured on this best French films list include The Diving Bell and the Butterfly , The Grand Illusion , and The Intouchables . Marie watches in awe as Floriane creates beautiful shapes and patterns in the water, before deciding she must join the team in order to get closer to Floriane. In ‘La Vie en Rose’, much creative energy seems to have been expended on figuring out how to tell the story in as flash a manner as possible, without quite marking out Piaf’s troubled essent, Pialat’s first feature is a wonderfully delicate study of a 10-year-old boy and his decline into delinquency when boarded out with foster parents after being abandoned by his mother. The Truth DIRECTOR: Hirokazu Koreeda CAST: Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche & Ethan Hawke Japanese star director Hirozu Kooreda first French … Stars: A portrait of group friendship that transcends its many story lines, ‘Vincent…’ is typical of the French auteur cinema that, although universally admired by critics, is not always appreciated by its viewing public (for whom ‘cinematic realism’ is often code for ‘boring as hell’). An actor’s director, Claude Sautet crafts films with an extraordinary attention to human detail, privileging dialogue and character development over plot turns or technical experimentation. Instead, Truffaut and his cinematographer, the great Raoul Coutard, use handheld camera, freeze-frames, newsreel footage and song in the same way the characters use races, bicycle trips or impromptu jumps into the Seine: to keep life (and cinema) crazy and beautiful at all times.

was declared and finished during the Occupation. In return, Jean decides to make Irène jealous by cosying up to a wealthy older woman, who showers him with gifts and affection.

The filmmaking is wildly inventive, but not in a clever-clogs manner. Terrific performances, and equally terrific camerawork from Nicolas Hayer – more gris than noir – conjure a rivetingly treacherous, twilit world.

He combats the inertia and boredom of his frustrated antagonists with a thrusting, jiving camera style which harries and punctuates their rambling, often very funny dialogue. | Gross: | Gross:

slob of a cop who initiates a private vendetta against the town’s more obnoxious citizens by resorting to murder. The quiet, delicately observed slapstick here works with far more hits than misses, although in comparison with, say, Keaton, Tati’s cold detachment from his characters seems to result in a decided lack of insight into human behaviour.

NB, A delightfully preposterous thriller (the McGuffin is some stolen Amazonian treasure), wittier than any of the Bond spoofs that subsequently flooded the market and a good deal racier than ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. Philippe Garrel Most will be swept off their feet by Michel Legrand’s scintillating jazz-pop score, charismatic supporting turns from Gene Kelly, Danielle Darrieux and Michel Piccoli, and – predominantly – Demy’s own infectious joie de vivre. it’s worth seeing: the mood remains, as does the film’s central sequence, a superbly executed silent jewel robbery in the Place Vendôme. Some people criticize it because they find it depicts a postcard-like life in Montmartre. As legend has it, audience members leapt up from their seats and screamed in fear as they watched a steam engine hurtling towards them – a novel on-screen experience that felt and looked so real it sparked a worldwide fascination with motion pictures. Melville’s hombres don’t talk a lot, they just move in and out of the shadows, their trenchcoats lined with guilt and their hats hiding their eyes. La Jetée (The Jetty) is a short film of 28 minutes directed by C. Marker and released in 1962.

Centreing on a lavish country house party given by the Marquis de la Chesnaye and his wife (Dalio, Gregor), the film effects. Francis Veber Once on board, Juliette is caught between her uncertain love for Jean and her desire to see a world beyond the restrictive confines of the boat. royal title (King Charles V-and-III-makes-VIII-and-VIII-makes-XVI), it merely allows more time to gape at the architecture of Tachycardia, a cool collage of Venetian canals, Bavarian castles and New York tower blocks that is vast, monolithic and truly vertiginous.

The director of ‘Hidden’ and ‘The White Ribbon’ offers an intimate and brave portrait of an elderly Parisian couple, Anne (Riva) and Georges (Trintignant), facing up to a sudden turning point in their lives. Wonderfully moving, with great performances. Director:

Vinz hangs out with Hubert (Koundé) and Saïd (Taghmaoui). Yes, his contrast of the glorious awfulness of the Arpels’ automated modernistic house with Hulot’s disordered bohemianism is simplistic. criticism when compared to writer/director Dumont’s tough, confident handling of mood, milieu, pace, performance and theme. Each grotesquely larger-than-life inhabitant of the scrofulous tenement has his own little story; visually, the film evokes Gilliam, Lynch, the Coens and Carné, but the allusions never get in the way of the nightmarish humour. The ultimate night-time film noir noir noir... until Belmondo pulls his own eyelids shut when he dies.

1280’, but this eccentric, darkly comic look at a series of bizarre murders is stylishly crafted and thoroughly entertaining. BR, Fifteen-year-old Suzanne (Bonnaire) seems unable to progress beyond a rather doleful promiscuity in her relations with boys. CA, In 1962, Trauffaut released an adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel ‘Jules et Jim’.

A quirky woman who spends her free time as a pilot has her purse stolen; when a mysterious man finds her wallet, they embark on a peculiar romance. Simone Signoret as the peroxide-blonde mistress is the harder of the two would-be killers, while Véra Clouzot is shivering and simpering as the wife. 122 min One of Chabrol’s mid-period masterpieces, a brilliantly ambivalent scrutiny of bourgeois marriage and murder that juggles compassion and cynicism in a way that makes Hitchcock look obvious. Stars: Darker, more abstract and desolate than his earlier work, this shows, set piece by set piece, the breakdown of the criminal codes under which Melville’s characters had previously operated.

This top features only cult classics, but some of them are less frequently quoted – I intentionally chose to cite them because they represent in my mind what French cinema has done best.