French Cinema

Six-year-old Cléo spends a final summer with her beloved nanny Gloria, in this profoundly moving story of chosen family, duty and innocence lost.

François Truffaut’s French New Wave landmark is one of the greatest movies about adolescence.

French writer-director Robin Campillo offers a searching exploration of memory and politics, in this boldly conceived story of boyhood in 1970s Madagascar.

Laure Calamy stars in this devious, involving French thriller by Sébastien Marnier, playing an outsider tangled in a web of upper-class family malice.

Jean Cocteau’s ravishingly restored 1946 film is a cinematic classic. “Five stars. [This] magical exploration of the fairytale is a compelling and bizarre masterpiece” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Agnès Varda’s award-winning study of those living on the margins of French society at the turn of the millennium.

Director Claire Denis gives a wry account of an artist’s search for love, in this witty black comedy starring Juliette Binoche.

Jean-Jacques Beineix’s story of a volatile, highly sexual relationship was one of the most successful French films of the 1980s.

Godard's playful tribute to the Hollywood pulp crime movies of the 1940s, executed with typically Gallic cool.

Bresson’s hugely influential study of a petty thief in late 50s Paris is one of his most widely acclaimed films.

Following separation from her money-squandering husband, Alice (Emilie Piponnier) finds herself falling into the world of high-end escorting, challenging her perceptions of life and love.

Ruth Rendell provides the source novel for this delicious tale of deception and identity, from the master of mischievous melodrama, François Ozon.

Eric Rohmer's masterpiece about a woman chasing romance and adventure during a long, hot summer.

Bresson’s superb final film and Cannes winner is a Tolstoy adaptation relating how a prank with a forged bank note leads to tragedy.

François Truffaut’s hugely popular classic depicts one of cinema’s most captivating love triangles

Eric Rohmer's final collaboration with the great cinematographer Néstor Almendros follows a holidaying teenager as she begins to navigate the adult world.

Kristen Stewart reunites with Olivier Assayas to play an A-List celebrity's personal shopper, who keeps receiving strange text messages from an unknown source.

Naively idealistic and largely inept both in his dealings with women and in any job, Antoine clumsily courts Christine while working for a private detective agency.

Shockingly explicit, Catherine Breillat’s critically acclaimed Romance is one of the most controversial films of modern cinema.

A director struggles to film a difficult sex scene between two actors who happen to hate each other, in Catherine Breillat's witty exploration of intimacy coordination.

Mathieu Kassovitz’s landmark mid-90s drama throws a cinematic Molotov cocktail at structural racism, police brutality and media manipulation.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s film of Jean Cocteau's controversial novel about a teenage brother and sister and their intense, closeted relationship.

Happily married Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) has his life is thrown into turmoil when Mathilde (Fanny Ardant) - an old flame - moves into the house opposite.

In this typically ambivalent comedy from Truffaut, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) becomes a father... But is he mature enough for parenthood?

Separated from Christine and uncertain about his latest relationship, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) has finally written a novel inspired by his own experiences in this final chapter of François Truffaut’s series.

Different worlds collide when a chic young diplomat's wife meets an intriguing adventurer and his hippy friends in Barbet Schroeder's striking second feature.

An incontestable masterpiece of silent cinema, Carl Dreyer's deeply moving biopic features one of the most powerful performances ever captured on film.

Catherine Deneuve shines as the director and lead actor of a Parisian theatre struggling to survive under the Nazi occupation in Truffaut's wartime drama.

A bittersweet fable about a young man's jealous pursuits; the first film in Eric Rohmer's six-film series, Comedies and Proverbs.

Claude Lanzmann's monumental chronicle of the Holocaust has been acclaimed by many as the greatest documentary ever made.

The first feature by Barbet Schroeder (Maîtresse, The Valley), More created a sensation when it was released in 1969, quickly becoming a cult classic and famed for its Pink Floyd soundtrack.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic, nail-biting suspense thriller won both The Golden Bear and the Palme d'Or in 1953.

Jacques Rivette’s biggest commercial hit is an exhilarating combination of theatricality, paranoia and ‘la vie parisienne’, around an entrancing examination of making and watching films.

Claude Lanzmann's monumental chronicle of the Holocaust has been acclaimed by many as the greatest documentary ever made.

Georges Franju’s gorgeous, poetic horror film about a surgeon’s dark obsession with restoring his daughter’s disfigured face.

Gerard Depardieu plays the young innocent who falls for the mysterious maitresse Ariane (Bulle Ogier), a leather clad dominatrix, in Barbet Schroeder’s controversial film.

Magical retelling of the Orpheus myth by poet, playwright, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau.

Jean Rollin’s hauntingly poetic horror about a man trying to solve the riddle of a tormenting childhood memory.

Truffaut’s Palme d'Or-nominated account of an ill-starred adulterous affair boasts Hitchcockian precision and pitch-perfect performances.

Alexandre Aja defined a new breed of horror by bringing the American slasher format into French cinema.