Best French Films of 2019

Les Particules (2019)

Blaise Harrison's fictional debut feature Les Particules is an auteur oddity that brings a highly original perspective to the familiar teen movie concept. An adolescent's coming-of-age is made more angst-ridden than usual by his sudden awareness of how strange the world around him appears. Is he imagining things or can it be that reality is being warped by the experiments taking place in the Large Hadron Collider which is situated 100 metres beneath his feet?

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Grâce à Dieu (2019)

Director François Ozon is never one to shy away from controversial subjects, but in Grâce à Dieu he is at his most provocative with a gripping drama inspired by the paedophilic exploits of a Roman Catholic priest. With creditable sensitivity and insight, the film shows the long-term effects of child abuse through three middle-aged men who, still badly traumatised by their childhood experiences, come together to ensure the perpetrator is brought to account.

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L'Adieu à la nuit (2019)

With his 26th film, acclaimed auteur filmmaker André Techiné addresses one of the hot topics of our time - Islamist radicalisation. L'Adieu à la nuit deals intelligently with the subject by focusing on the strained relationship between a 60-something woman (Catherine Deneuve) and her favourite grandson. The latter may look like a perfectly normal dude in his late teens, but he has become a Jihadist with every intention of laying down his life in the holy war against the Infidel West. Imbued with an unsettling tenebrous poetry, this memorable film offers a bleak testimony of the malaise that is at the heart of French society
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Le Chant du loup (2019)

Written and directed by a former French diplomat, Antonin Baudry. Le Chant du loup is a big budget submarine-based action thriller that gives its Hollywood counterpart a very good run for its money, basically by recycling old ideas and repackaging them with gusto that far exceeds the author's imaginative capabilities. Clichéd and contrived it may be, but the film is expertly directed and boasts some stunning set-pieces. In this gripping race-against-time yarn, a lone sonar technician has his work cut out to prevent the whole world being set alight by a nuclear exchange. Far fetched? Just a little.

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Les Plus belles années d'une vie (2019)

Half a century after he made Un homme et une femme, his most celebrated film, director Claude Lelouch brings together his two favourite actors - Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée - for an affectionate reunion that allows him to be pay a special tribute to two much-loved icons of French cinema. A heart-felt celebration of love and life, Les Plus belles années d'une vie intercuts poignant scenes of Trintignant and Aimée, now in their eighties, with excerpts from Lelouch's acclaimed 1966 film and his 1976 short film C'était un rendez-vous, with music from his long-serving composer Francis Lai.

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Mais vous êtes fous (2019)

Audrey Diwan makes a promising directorial debut with Mais vous êtes fous, a film that shows the toxic capacities of a concealed drug addiction for wrecking a perfectly happy family. With strong performances from its leads Pio Marmai and Céline Sallette, who play a drug-addicted family man and his conflicted wife, the film shows the devastating impact of drug addiction with a harrowing realism. The plot feels a tad mechanical in places, but the quality of the acting and direction make it an absorbing slice-of-life drama.

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Damien veut changer le monde (2019)

Damien veut changer le monde is the fourth film from director Xavier de Choudens, a good-natured social comedy that takes a refreshingly light-hearted look at one of the burning issues in France today - society's attitude towards illegal immigration. De Choudens's film is a timely reaction against the anti-immigrant sentiment that is now sweeping Europe, arguing that integration, not mass expulsion, is the answer to a brewing human catastrophe. Popular star Franck Gastambide plays a well-meaning goon intent on changing the world for the better, and comes up with a novel solution to a problem that has so far defeated the best political minds in France.

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Dernier amour (2019)

Award winning director Benoît Jacquot returns to his favourite theme - the destructive power of romantic desire - in Dernier amour, an account of an episode in the life of the notorious Italian libertine Giacomo Casanova. Vincent Lindon brings to his portrayal of the great lover a vulnerability that is heart-breaking to watch, but it is Stacy Martin who steals the film as the demonically alluring temptress who inflames Casanova's passions and taints his life forever. A slow burner, the film is unlikely to attract a mass audience but for those who appreciate Jacquot's understated brand of cinema it is a compelling work, heaving with real emotion.

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La Lutte des classes (2019)

The team that brought us the 2010 hit Le Nom des gens return with another highly pertinent social comedy, one that chimes with present-day concerns about the state of education in France, Michel Leclerc and Baya Kasmi once again indulge in a spot of gentle left-bashing as they follow a couple who are driven to ditch their socialist principles so that their offspring can get a better education in a private school. La Lutte des classes doesn't quite have the impact of Leclerc's 2010 comedy, but it reminds us what a hot topic education has become in France as the state sector continues to buckle under the strain of increased demand and declining public expenditure.

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Les Invisibles (2019)

In his third feature director Louis-Julien Petit delivers a heart-warming social comedy that humanely tackles another major social concern in modern France, homelessness. Les Invisibles depicts a group of committed social workers (all women) who create their own homeless drop-in centre when the town's official centre is closed down after being judged ineffective. By using real homeless people to effectively play themselves in the film, Petit gives his film a startling authenticity, although the fictional subplots involving the four main characters (played by professional actresses) are somewhat less convincing.

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Jusqu'ici tout va bien (2019)

Director Mohamed Hamidi follows his quirky 2016 comedy La Vache with a lively culture clash comedy in which a small businessman (Gilles Lellouche) is forced to move his company into the rough suburbs of Paris. Popular stand-up comic-turned actor Malik Bentalha plays the streetwise local who saves the day by helping to indoctrinate a band of genteel Parisians into life in the hellish outer environs of the capital. Hamidi's film plays mischievously with the familiar stereotypes and clichés in its attempt to remind us how hard life is in the immigrant-ridden low depths of outer Paris, but amidst the facile humour there are some well-judged comments on the invidious social divide in France today.

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Blanche comme neige (2019)

Anne Fontaine's take on the children's fairytale Snow White is an imaginative black comedy in which the innocent heroine of the original story is transformed into a sexually precocious dazzler - one who manages to wreak havoc in a household of seven men with more hang-ups than most psychiatric clinics. Bolstering her stylistic flair with some outrageous nods to Hitchcock, Fontaine crafts a deliciously dark fable in which one young woman's quest for freedom (after evading the murderous intentions of Isabelle Huppert) spell no end of trouble for seven hapless goons who have yet to appreciate the deadly power of an unbridled female desire. Benoît Poelvoorde and Vincent Macaigne are just two of Snow White's victims in this utterly deranged comedy.

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Convoi exceptionnel (2019)

In his latest surreal flight of fancy, director Bertrand Blier brings together Gérard Depardieu and Christian Clavier for a totally unhinged comedy in which the protagonists suddenly realise that they are in a film about their own lives. Unable to depart from the script they have been given, the oddball duo are sent from one unlikely situation to another, neither apparently having the faintest idea what is going on. Convoi exceptionnel is an interesting stab at the metafilm concept, as weird and iconoclastic as Blier's earlier great films (notably Buffet froid).

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Raoul Taburin (2019)

Raoul Taburin is one of the more successful attempts by a filmmaker to adapt a classic francophone bande dessinée,. This one is based on a popular work by the esteemed graphic artist Sempé (the creator of Le Petit Nicolas) that first appeared in 1995. Directed by Pierre Godeau, Raoul Taburin is an amiable sojourn in a picturesque spot of southeast France, with Benoît Poelvoorde wistfully looking back on his life as he regrets never being able to ride a bicycle. Evocative of Jacques Tati's Jour de fête, the film lures us into a bygone world for a bucolic fable that is positively dripping with nostalgia.

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L'Autre continent (2019)

Director Romain Cogitore's second feature is a sumptuously photographed melodrama which makes effective use of its exotic location in the Far East to tell a story of real human interest. L'Autre continent shows us the devastating impact of an intense love affair on an individual - a free-spirited career woman - who is totally ill-equipped to deal with its demands. With some doses of acerbic humour, Cogitore avoids the saccharine excesses of the film's Hollywood counterpart, and with strong performances from the leads Déborah François and Paul Hamy it offers an emotionally intense account of an ill-fated love affair.

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Le Jeune Ahmed (2019)

With Le Jeune Ahmed, Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne embrace the topical subject of radicalisation, using this as the pretext for a compelling study in teenage alienation. The film presents a grim tale of contamination and survival against the odds, with an impressionable teenager driven to murder a schoolteacher after being converted to the cause of Jihadism by his imam. When the murder attempt fails, the would-be killer is sent to a centre for young offenders where he subjected to further mental conditioning by social workers. At no point are we able to get inside the protagonist's head - he remains a closed book, a grim admission perhaps that radicalisation is something that will forever be beyond our comprehension.

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