Best French films of all time

1. La Règle du jeu (1939)

Reviled by critics and audience when it was first seen, La Règle du Jeu (a.k.a. The Rules of the Game) is now almost universally acknowledged as one of the greatest of all French films, the crowning achievement of Jean Renoir's remarkable filmmaking career. A scurrilous satire on class divisions and the attitudes of the French bourgeoisie in the 1930s, no film better depicts the separation between the aristocracy and the working classes in France on the eve of World War II. This is not only Renoir's most ambitious and most technically flawless film, it is also his most enduring, a darkly comedic commentary on the eternal divide between the haves and the have nots.

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2. Les Enfants du paradis (1945)

Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise) was the most ambitious film to come out of the fruitful partnership between director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. Made under the most difficult of circumstances, when France was under Nazi occupation, the film is a visual tour de force, a sprawling blockbuster to rival Hollywood's Gone With the Wind. Ostensibly a tale of unrequited love and amorous rivalry set in the Parisian theatre world of the 1830s, the film came to be regarded as an overt symbol of defiance against the Nazis and the Vichy régime. Many members of the cast and crew were active in the French resistance or Jews being sheltered from the Germans. With its epic narrative, stunning production values and mesmerising performances (from a stellar cast that included Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault), the film was a massive box office hit after the Liberation but was overlooked by most of the critics. Today, it is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.

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3. Napoléon (1927)

One of the great pioneers of French cinema, Abel Gance explored the possibilities of silent film to his fullest in this six-hour long epic, which recounts the early years of Napoléon Bonaparte with breathtaking ambition and extraordinary visual flair. In making this film, Gance bankrupted his financial backers and hindered his subsequent career, but the result is one of the great monuments of cinema, an unsurpassed experimental masterpiece. In its original form, Napoléon employed colour tinting, split screen and triptych photography, although few cinemas had the special equipment required to screen it in this format. So attached was Gance to this film that he re-edited it (with additional scenes) as a sound film in 1934 and later as a lavish drama-documentary at the end of his career. With its impressive battle scenes and startlingly inventive camerawork, Napoléon deserves its reputation as the most outstanding French film of the silent era.

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4. Le Mépris (1963)

There is a satisfying irony in the fact Jean-Luc Godard's most accessible film is also one of his most complex and important. Le Mépris (Contempt) is Godard's most coherent and effective assault on commercial cinema, a provocative yet intensely compelling piece that delivers a cogent moral on the destructive consequences that follow from cowardly compromise, in both one's professional and private life. Brigitte Bardot has never looked more ravishingly beautiful, nor has she given a more stunning performance, than she does here, ably supported by an unlikely cast that includes Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance and Fritz Lang. Oddly, Le Mépris was to be Godard's final (grudging) concession to mainstream cinema; after this, he didn't seem to care about what audiences or critics thought about his work - the only spectator that mattered was himself. In this sense, Le Mépris feels like a mission statement for everything that Godard did next.

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5. Jules et Jim (1962)

François Truffaut's inspired adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché's autobiographical novel Jules et Jim was to be one of the high points of the French New Wave and secured the international reputation of the director and his lead actress, Jeanne Moreau. A film of extraordinary intimacy and lyrical power, Jules et Jim encapsulates Truffaut's vision of life and cinema more than any other film he made. It has a timeless appeal, a dark-edged celebration of love, life and friendship that has an intoxicating simplicity and charm. Moreau is at her most enigmatic and compelling as the inscrutable femme fatale Catherine, with Oskar Werner and Henri Serre completing the ill-fated ménage-à-trois to perfection. Beautifully photographed by Raoul Coutard and memorably scored by Georges Delerue, Jules et Jim has a unique poetry that is so redolent of its era and makes it one of the most captivating of all French films.

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6. La Grande illusion (1937)

Conceived by director Jean Renoir as an appeal for national unity at a time of unprecedented political and economic crisis, La Grande illusion met with a warm approval from critics and audiences when it was first released in 1937, although it later fell out of favour and was banned by the French government in 1940 for its depiction of fraternisation. Germany's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels dubbed the film Cinematographic Enemy Number One and ordered that all prints of the film be destroyed once France had capitulated to the Nazis. Miraculously, the film did survive and is now considered one of the greatest anti-war films of all time, a film that poignantly reminds us of the illusory nature of the barriers that divide one man from another.

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7. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)

There is a simplicity and tortured humanity to Carl Theodor Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (a.k.a. The Passion of Joan of Arc) which ensures that no one who watches this film can fail to be moved by it. Dreyer's aggressive use of close-up lends the film an extraordinarily brutal immediacy, forcing the spectator to identify with the heroine (superbly portrayed by Maria Falconetti) and feel her humiliation and suffering as she undergoes her calvary as a victim of man's unthinking cruelty. The film proved to be highly contentious (particularly with the Catholic Church) when it was first seen and was not a commercial success. Following its restoration in the early 1980s, its reputation as a silent masterpiece has been bolstered and it now ranks as one of the great cinema triumphs of all time.

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8. Les Quatre cents coups (1959)

François Truffaut's directing career got off to a flying start with what is considered to be one of his greatest achievements, an intensely involving portrait of adolescent rebellion which closely mirrors the director's own troubled juvenile upbringing. Les 400 coups (a.k.a. The 400 Blows) won Truffaut the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival and established him as one of the leading lights of the French New Wave. Formerly a firebrand critic on the Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut brought a fresh impetus to French cinema in the late 1950s, paving the way for a whole new generation of auteur filmmakers. The talented 14-year-old lead actor Jean-Pierre Léaud became one of Truffaut's most faithful collaborators, reprising the role of the director's alter ego Antoine Doinel in four of his subsequent films.

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9. La Belle et la bête (1946)

Of the handful of films that Jean Cocteau directed, surely none has the alluring visual poetry of La Belle et la bête, a remarkably inspired re-interpretation of the well-known Beauty and the Beast fairytale. Endlessly referenced by other filmmakers, the film is a piece of pure cinematic magic, the sets, costumes and photography conjuring up a realm of childhood fantasy that is as tangible as anything in our world, only far more enticing and believable. Cocteau's favourite actor Jean Marais is perfect for the part of the Beast, projecting an aching loneliness and terrifying menace through his startling leonine mask, whilst holding us in his thrall as he savours Cocteau's exquisitely poetic dialogue. In the austere aftermath of World War II, this was the kind of escapist fantasy that French audiences desperately needed.

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10. L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961)

The product of an improbable partnership between modernist filmmaker Alain Resnais and nouveau roman author Alain Robbe-Grillet, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (a.k.a. Last Year in Marienbad) is assuredly one of the most perplexing and inexplicably mesmerising of all French films. From its haunting opening sequence, a long tracking shot through a deserted mausoleum of a house, the spectator is hooked and becomes a willing onlooker in a bewildering romantic intrigue in which the barrier between reality and fantasy is well and truly annihilated. Time and space have no meaning in the flaky dream-world that Resnais projects us into, a limbo-like alternative reality in which everyone resembles an automaton who is condemned to play out the same routine for eternity. Can this never-ending charade, a cruel parody of life, be a mere fantasy, or is it a terrifying prediction of the nightmare that is to come after death...?

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11. Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

With his remarkable debut feature, director Alain Resnais combines an exquisite story of a relived amorous infatuation with a haunting meditation on man's propensity for senseless destruction. Just as we may cling to the memory of an idyllic love affair, so we must not forget the tragedy of Hiroshima - the past is what allows us to make sense of the present. Resnais's fascination for the relationship between time and memory is central to his work but it has its most powerful and poetic expression in this complex and beguiling work.

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12. Pierrot le fou (1965)

Jean-Luc Godard's self-conscious attempt to deconstruct the American gangster film is a mass of contradictions, a film that is reviled by some and regarded by others as the greatest piece of cinema art ever. Pierrot le fou is one of the most beautifully photographed of Godard's films but it is also one of his most perplexing, a film that appears to be as much about the incompatability of the sexes as a tongue-in-cheek homage to the American pulp fiction. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina are perfectly suited for the two contrasting lead characters and inject a healthy dose of sixties style and eccentricity into one of cinema's weirdest existential odysseys.

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13. Les Yeux sans visage (1960)

If there were such a thing as an award for the creepiest French film of all time, it would surely go to Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage, a mesmerising horror-fantasy that somehow manages to distinguish itself from British Gothic horror films of the time and their Italian Baroque counterparts. With its stunning dreamlike composition and truly gruesome story about a face-stealing mad surgeon (Pierre Brasseur at his most chilling), this is a film that shocks and delights in roughly equal measure, one of cinema's most wonderfully poetic excursions into the realm of pure terror.

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14. Le Cercle rouge (1970)

Arguably the most perfect of Jean-Pierre Melville's sublime gangster films, Le Cercle rouge brings together three icons of French cinema (Alain Delon, Yves Montand and Bourvil) and pits them against one another in the most stylish, most intricately constructed policier of the decade. With a spectacular heist sequence to rival that of Jules Dassin's Du rififi chez les hommes, a compelling plot and some stunning performances, it is easy to see why this was Melville's most successful film - it is a tour de force in every respect.

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15. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)

The acme of the French film musical has to be Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, one of the most captivating and moving romantic films ever to have been made in France. The fact that Demy's melancholic dreamworld is so far removed from and yet so near to the realities of present day France (in particular the Algerian War) lends it an added poignancy, whilst Michel Legrand's music carries such emotional feeling that you scarcely notice the creaking mechanics of the overly sentimental plot. The film made 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve an international star and proved beyond any doubt that Hollywood did not have a monopoly on quality musicals. Anyone who can resist blubbering like a newborn as the final scene reaches it tragic crescendo is probably in the advanced stages of rigor mortis.

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