There is something quietly revolutionary about a woman who simply refuses to be nice. Not misunderstood, not secretly ki...

There are few cinematic images more instantly recognisable to generations of French audiences than the sight of a small,...

What does it mean to retell a story? For Claude Lelouch, the answer is not necessarily to reproduce its original charact...

Cédric Klapisch’s Russian Dolls (Les Poupées russes, 2005) is a film about romantic relationships, but it is equally a f...

Jacques Deray's Flic Story (1975) is ostensibly an Alain Delon film. Delon plays Roger Borniche, the celebrated police i...

Gérard Oury's La Grande Vadrouille (1966) occupies a remarkable place in French popular cinema. Set during the German oc...

Jean-Marie Poiré’s Papy fait de la résistance (1983) occupies an unusual position in French cinema. On the surface, it i...

In Delinda Jacobs’s 2017 French television series La Forêt, the forest is far more than a geographical setting for a cri...

Le Grand Bain is ostensibly a comedy about a group of middle-aged men who form an unlikely synchronised swimming team.

Florence Foresti’s Désordres initially presents itself as a familiar kind of television comedy: a successful woman in he...

Yves Angelo’s Le Colonel Chabert is, on the surface, a historical drama about a soldier who returns from the dead. Adapt...

The French series Mafiosa does not present organized crime as spectacle so much as it presents it as a governing conditi...

Beaumarchais l’insolent approaches its subject less as a historical biography than as a meditation on performance as a p...

Saint-Exupéry: The Last Romantic is less a conventional documentary than an exercise in interpretation: it constructs An...

Romantic comedies often rely on improbable circumstances, misunderstandings, and grand gestures to unite their protagoni...

Anthony Marciano's Play (2019) is, on the surface, a coming-of-age comedy that follows several decades in the life of Ma...

There are certain film series that endure because they are considered masterpieces, and then there are those that endure...

When Tenue de soirée premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986, it arrived at a moment when French cinema was renego...

To understand modern French cinema without the Cannes Film Festival is to miss the stage on which France has most consis...

The French mini-series Romance (created by Hervé Hadmar) presents itself as a hybrid of melodrama, fantasy, and thriller...