From Jean Renoir to the Nouvelle Vague to the new generation of Cannes laureates, ten essential French films that defined modern cinema.
French cinema is the longest continuous tradition in world filmmaking. The Lumière brothers staged the first public screening in Paris in 1895. The Cinémathèque Française built the most important film archive in Europe. The Nouvelle Vague rewrote the grammar of cinema in the late 1950s, and France has continued, decade after decade, to produce filmmakers who think seriously about what the medium can do. The country also funds its own cinema more aggressively than any other in Europe — a quarter of all box-office revenue is redirected back into French production through the CNC, which is why French film remains both stubbornly auteur-driven and commercially robust.
The ten films below span eighty-four years, from the late 1930s to the early 2020s. They include three winners of the Palme d'Or, two Oscar winners, and several films routinely listed on Sight & Sound's poll of the greatest films ever made. Whether you're new to French cinema or filling in the gaps, here are ten films you need to watch.
1. The Rules of the Game (1939)
Dir. Jean Renoir · France · Drama / Comedy
Jean Renoir's portrait of a French aristocratic society on the eve of war is, for many critics, the finest film ever made in any language. A weekend at a country estate brings together the wealthy, their staff, and a celebrated aviator who has fallen in love with the host's wife. Renoir's deep-focus compositions allow multiple actions to unfold in the same frame — a technique that would influence everyone from Welles to Altman.
The film was poorly received on its 1939 release and pulled from cinemas after the German occupation banned it. It was reconstructed in 1959 and has appeared in every Sight & Sound critics' poll since. A film about manners that turns out to be about an entire civilisation, made just before that civilisation collapsed.
2. The 400 Blows (1959)
Dir. François Truffaut · France · Drama
The film that launched the Nouvelle Vague and one of the most autobiographical works in French cinema. Truffaut, a twenty-seven-year-old former critic at Cahiers du cinéma, drew on his own troubled Paris adolescence to create Antoine Doinel, played by the thirteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud in his first screen performance. The result is a film about childhood that refuses every cliché of the form.
Truffaut won Best Director at Cannes for what was effectively his debut feature, and the film's final shot — a freeze-frame on Léaud's face — became one of the most quoted images in cinema. Léaud and Truffaut would return to the Doinel character in four further films over twenty years, but nothing they made afterwards has the rawness of this one.
3. Breathless (1960)
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard · France · Crime / Drama
Godard's debut feature, made on a shoestring with Truffaut's story outline and Claude Chabrol's technical advice, is the most influential film of its decade. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Michel, a small-time thief modelling himself on American gangster movies; Jean Seberg plays Patricia, the American student selling the Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées. The plot is almost incidental. What matters is the look, the rhythm, the jump cuts, the way the characters speak directly to camera.
Breathless is the film that made the Nouvelle Vague impossible to ignore, and that announced Godard as the most provocative young director in Europe. Sixty-five years on, it still feels like a film made yesterday by someone who didn't know the rules — except that he knew them better than anyone.
4. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Dir. Alain Resnais · France / Japan · Drama / Romance
Marguerite Duras wrote the screenplay; Alain Resnais directed; Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada star. A French actress, in Hiroshima to make a film about peace, has a brief affair with a Japanese architect. Their conversation, woven across the film's running time, becomes a meditation on memory, on the impossibility of bearing witness to atrocity, and on the way personal grief and historical horror inhabit the same body.
Resnais had previously made Night and Fog, the foundational Holocaust documentary. His move into fiction film carried that documentary instinct with it. Hiroshima Mon Amour is widely cited alongside Breathless and The 400 Blows as one of the films that announced a new kind of cinema. Few films have asked harder questions about what cinema is for.
5. La Haine (1995)
Dir. Mathieu Kassovitz · France · Crime / Drama
Twenty-four hours in the lives of three young men from the Paris banlieues — Vinz, Saïd, and Hubert — in the aftermath of a riot. Mathieu Kassovitz's second feature was made on the back of a year of actual unrest in the suburbs surrounding Paris, and shot in stark black-and-white that recalls early Scorsese. Vincent Cassel, Saïd Taghmaoui, and Hubert Koundé became overnight stars.
Kassovitz won Best Director at Cannes; La Haine went on to become the defining French film of its decade and a touchstone for every cinema concerned with race, class, and policing. The Prime Minister Alain Juppé reportedly screened it for his cabinet. Three decades on, it has lost none of its anger or its formal bravura.
6. Amélie (2001)
Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet · France / Germany · Comedy / Romance
The most internationally successful French film of the twenty-first century. Audrey Tautou plays Amélie Poulain, a shy waitress in a Montmartre café who decides to engineer small acts of kindness in the lives of those around her. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's hyper-stylised Paris — saturated greens and reds, retouched skies, a fairy-tale Pont des Arts — became one of the most distinctive visual signatures in modern European cinema.
The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film, and remains the highest-grossing French-language film outside France. It is also more melancholic than its reputation suggests: a film about loneliness as much as whimsy, with a central performance from Tautou that grounds every flight of fancy in genuine longing.
7. A Prophet (2009)
Dir. Jacques Audiard · France / Italy · Crime / Drama
Tahar Rahim, in his breakthrough role, plays Malik El Djebena, a nineteen-year-old of Arab descent serving a six-year sentence in a French prison run by Corsican gangsters. Jacques Audiard's film is a prison movie, a crime drama, and a coming-of-age story all at once, told with patient attention to institutional detail.
The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes (the runner-up to the Palme d'Or), eight Césars including Best Film, and a long list of European Film Awards. It also announced Tahar Rahim as one of the most charismatic actors of his generation. Two-and-a-half hours that pass like ninety minutes; rigorous, propulsive, and built to last.
8. The Intouchables (2011)
Dir. Olivier Nakache & Éric Toledano · France · Comedy / Drama / Biography
Based on the true story of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, a wealthy quadriplegic, and his unlikely live-in carer, a young man from the Paris banlieues with a criminal record. François Cluzet and Omar Sy play the two men with extraordinary charm and chemistry, and the film became a global phenomenon — at one point the second-highest-grossing French-language film of all time.
Sy won the César for Best Actor, the first Black actor to do so. The film's genre is essentially feel-good comedy, but Nakache and Toledano give it real emotional substance. A reminder that French cinema can be popular without being insipid.
9. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Dir. Céline Sciamma · France · Drama / Romance
Late eighteenth-century Brittany. A young painter (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned to produce a wedding portrait of a reluctant aristocrat (Adèle Haenel) — to be painted in secret, while observing her on long walks along the coast. Céline Sciamma's fourth feature is a film about looking, about the ethics of representation, and about a love that exists outside the structures of the world.
Sciamma won Best Screenplay at Cannes; the film took prizes across Europe and remains one of the most discussed releases of its decade. Claire Mathon's cinematography (every shot composed with the deliberation of a painted canvas) is among the finest in recent French cinema. Slow, quiet, and possessed of a formal authority that few films achieve.
10. Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
Dir. Justine Triet · France · Crime / Drama / Mystery
A man falls from the upper window of his Alpine chalet. His wife, a successful novelist (Sandra Hüller), is the only adult home; their visually impaired son discovers the body. The investigation that follows is the basis of Justine Triet's two-and-a-half-hour courtroom film, which is interested less in solving the death than in what marriage does to the people inside it.
Triet became only the third woman to win the Palme d'Or; the film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Best Picture. Hüller's performance, in French and English, is one of the great recent achievements in screen acting. A film that rewards every moment of its considerable length.
The French Tradition
What links these ten films, despite the eighty-four years between the earliest and latest, is a willingness to take cinema seriously as an art form. French film culture has always been more confident than its neighbours that the medium is worth thinking about — that questions of form, of the politics of representation, of what happens when a camera is pointed at a person, are questions worth pursuing on their own terms.
The other through-line is the French commitment to funding cinema as a public good. The CNC, the cooperative model of the producers, the unbroken pipeline of small festivals across the country — these have together produced a cinema that can sustain both the singularity of a Bresson and the popular reach of a Nakache and Toledano. There is no other country in Europe where this arrangement works at the same scale.
Honourable Mention: Jules and Jim (1962)
Dir. François Truffaut · France · Drama / Romance
Truffaut's third feature, with Jeanne Moreau in her career-defining role as Catherine, follows a friendship between a French and an Austrian writer in the years before and after the First World War. Adapted from Henri-Pierre Roché's autobiographical novel, it is one of the most lyrical works of the early Nouvelle Vague, and a film whose tone — somewhere between euphoria and melancholy — has rarely been matched. Worth seeing on the same evening as The 400 Blows.
Where to Start
If you're new to French cinema, Amélie and The Intouchables are immediately accessible and showcase the popular face of contemporary French film. For the foundations of the modern cinematic vocabulary, start with The 400 Blows and Breathless — the two films that more or less invented the language of the new cinema. For more recent prestige, Anatomy of a Fall is the most rewarding French film of the past five years.
If you enjoyed this list, explore our companion guides — our 10 Must-Watch French Crime Films and our 10 Must-Watch European Films of 2025.
