De Gaulle: Résistance

Antonin Baudry came to directing from an unusual route: a career in the French diplomatic service, then the comic Quai d'Orsay under the pen name Abel Lanzac, and in 2019 the submarine thriller The Wolf's Call. De Gaulle is his second feature and, by some distance, the largest French production of 2026: a two-part biographical epic co-written with Bérénice Vila and based on Julian Jackson's biography A Certain Idea of France. The first part premiered out of competition at Cannes in May 2026, and Pathé released it that June.

Simon Abkarian plays de Gaulle as a man behaving as though he already embodies France while almost nobody has recognised him; Simon Russell Beale is Churchill, and their alliance of affection and exasperation supplies much of the film's humour. Benoît Magimel, Mathieu Kassovitz and Loïc Corbery fill out the political and military cast. Alongside the London story, Baudry follows a pair of young Parisians drawn into resistance under the occupation, so the film moves between the war room and the street. Pierre Cottereau and Giora Bejach share the photography, and Volker Bertelmann, the Oscar-winning composer of All Quiet on the Western Front, wrote the score.

It was one of the best-received French films of the year with both critics and audiences, holding 100% on Rotten Tomatoes across its first reviews, an IMDb rating of 7.8 and nearly sixty thousand Letterboxd ratings. It sits in a long French tradition of Resistance cinema that runs from Melville's Army of Shadows onwards, but with the scale and momentum of a modern historical epic.