French
see all genres ›Cinema was born in France (or at least the public exhibition of motion pictures) and the medium shows no signs of slowing down. France remains the go-to first stop for many film buffs seeking foreign alternatives to commercial formula since French filmmakers have a justifiable reputation for unaffected, intimately-scaled dramas of everyday life.
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Genres / International / European / French
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And God Created Woman
The astounding success of Roger Vadim's AND GOD CREATED WOMAN revolutionized the foreign film market and turned Brigitte Bardot into an international star. Bardot stars as Juliette, an eighteen-year-old orphan whose unbridled appetite for pleasure shakes up all of St. Tropez;...Watch Movie
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Brute Force
As hard-hitting as its title, BRUTE FORCE was the first of Jules Dassin's forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama that takes a critical look at American society as well. Burt Lancaster is the timeworn Joe Collins, who, along with his fellow inmates, lives under the heavy thumb of the...Watch Movie
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A Summer's Tale
Gaspard, a recent university graduate, arrives at the seaside in Bretagne for three weeks' vacation before starting a new job. He's hoping his sort-of girlfriend, the fickle Léna, will join him there; but as the days pass, he welcomes the interest of Margot, a student of ethnology working as a...Watch Movie
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Breathless
There was before BREATHLESS, and there was after BREATHLESS. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes...Watch Movie
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Vivre sa vie
VIVRE SA VIE was a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study. The lovely Anna Karina, Godard's greatest muse, plays Nana, a young Parisian who aspires to be an actress but instead ends up a...Watch Movie
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The Final Girl
A sultry mystery takes viewers on an eerie and captivating journey through the psyches of three Parisian women whose paths converge around a vanished fourth. Combining raw documentary footage of the French capital, cryptic dialogue, and atmospheric music, the film seduces viewers, leaving them...Watch Movie
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Black Orpheus
Winner of both the Academy Award® for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d'Or, Marcel Camus' BLACK ORPHEUS brings the ancient Greek myth of "Orpheus and Eurydice" to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and...Watch Movie
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Orpheus
Jean Cocteau's update of the Orpheus myth depicts a famous poet, scorned by the Left Bank youth, and his love for both his wife, Eurydice, and a mysterious princess. Seeking inspiration, the poet follows the princess from the world of the living to the land of the dead, through Cocteau's famous...Watch Movie
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The Wages of Fear
In a squalid South American oil town, four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route. As they ferry their explosive cargo to a faraway oil fire, each bump and jolt tests their courage, their...Watch Movie
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Verdun
In order to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the end of World War I, Léon Poirier recreated the battle of Verdun and inscribed in history the lives of symbolic characters from both sides of the front. VERDUN was edited in three distinct parts (Might, Hell and Fate) and is an epic film of great...Watch Movie
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Violette
Violette Leduc, born out of wedlock at the beginning of the 20th century, encountered Simone de Beauvoir in the post-WWII years in St-Germain-des-Prés. An intense relationship began between the two women, which would last their whole lives, a relationship based on the quest for freedom through...Watch Movie
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Li'l Quinquin
Bruno Dumont proves as eccentric and engaging a director of comedy as he is of enigmatic art house drama with LI'L QUINQUIN, a four-part miniseries with the strangest genre mix this side of TWIN PEAKS. There is a tale of adolescent boredom and mischievous antics over a summer vacation in rural...Watch Movie
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Fanny
Abandoned and still in love, Fanny finds out she's expecting Marius' child. Now an unmarried mother, she's unable to take responsibility for her and her child's future. With the approval of her mother and of Cesar, her child grandfather, she gives in and marries Honore Panisse, a wealthy merchant...Watch Movie
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Wrong
Dolph Springer awakens one morning to find he has lost the sole love of his life, his dog, Paul. Desperate to reunite with his best friend and to set things right, Dolph embarks on a journey which spirals into the realm of the absurd. On his quest, he drastically alters the lives of several...Watch Movie
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Class of Struggle
In 1967, Chris Marker and Mario Marret (under the aegis of SLON) produced À BIENTÔT J'ESPÈRE, which documented a strike and factory occupation, the first in France since 1936, by textile workers at the Rhodiaceta textile plant in Besançon, the goals of which prefigured many of...Watch Movie
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Be Seeing You
From 1967 to 1976 Chris Marker was a member of SLON (the "Company for the Launching of New Works"). One of several groups that emerged in those years in which filmmakers, militants, and others came together on a cooperative, parallel basis, SLON was based on the idea that cinema should not be...Watch Movie
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17 Girls
Based on a headline-grabbing incident in the U.S., sister directing duo Delphine and Muriel Coulin's provocative debut feature (which they also co-wrote) follows the fallout in a sleepy French coastal town of Brittany, when a group of seventeen teenage girls from the same high school all decide...Watch Movie
