District B13

By the early 2000s Luc Besson's EuropaCorp had become a factory for lean, exportable French action, and District B13, which Besson co-wrote and produced, is the purest thing it made. It was the directing debut of Pierre Morel, previously the cinematographer of The Transporter, who would go on to make Taken. Released in 2004, it arrived a year before the Paris banlieue riots and was later read as an uncomfortably prescient piece of pulp.

The premise is a comic-book sketch — a walled ghetto, a stolen bomb, an unlikely partnership between a cop and a local — but the film exists to showcase two extraordinary physical performers. David Belle, one of the founders of parkour, plays Leïto, and his opening chase across the rooftops and stairwells of a tower block remains one of the most imitated action sequences of its decade. Cyril Raffaelli, a stuntman and martial artist, plays Damien, whose first fight scene is a showcase of controlled, acrobatic brutality. Morel shoots the stunts with minimal wirework and clear, legible geography, and at under ninety minutes the film never slows long enough to worry about plausibility.

Critics welcomed it as a jolt of pure kinetic cinema, and it helped carry parkour into the global mainstream, from Bond's Casino Royale to countless video games. It spawned a sequel, District 13: Ultimatum, and an American remake, but the original remains the benchmark for French action cinema of the period.