The Crimson Rivers

Mathieu Kassovitz's The Crimson Rivers (French: Les Rivières pourpres) opened in France in September 2000, took over $14 million at the domestic box office and was one of the highest-grossing French thrillers of its decade. Five years earlier Kassovitz had broken through internationally with La Haine (1995), which won him the Best Director prize at Cannes. The Crimson Rivers was his first genre thriller, and a deliberate move away from social realism.

The screenplay adapts Jean-Christophe Grangé's 1998 novel of the same name. Grangé, a war journalist turned crime novelist, had become one of the most successful French genre writers of the 1990s, and the book sold over a million copies in France alone. Jean Reno, at the peak of his French commercial pull after Léon (1994) and Mission: Impossible (1996), is paired with Vincent Cassel, fresh from working with Kassovitz on La Haine and from Gaspar Noé's Seul contre tous. Nadia Farès, Karim Belkhadra and Dominique Sanda fill the central supporting roles.

Thierry Arbogast, Luc Besson's longtime cinematographer (The Fifth Element, The Professional), shot it, and Bruno Coulais wrote the score. Sony Pictures Classics bought it for the U.S. market, and it earned César nominations for Best Sound and Best Cinematography. Kassovitz produced and directed a 2004 sequel, Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse (without Cassel), and the property later became an eight-season Canal+/Studiocanal television series, running from 2018 onwards.