The 400 Blows
Directed by Francois Truffaut
1959 · France
The French New Wave announces itself: Truffaut put his own miserable childhood on screen at twenty-seven, and the last shot changed what an ending was allowed to do.
★ 8.6
The Movies canon
Sourced and screened.
Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Breathless (A Bout de Souffle)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1960 · France
Modern film editing starts here, and partly by accident: Godard shortened an overlong picture by cutting inside his own shots, and the jump cut has been legal ever since.
★ 8.3
Le Samourai
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
1967
Every filmmaker who has ever shot a hitman putting on a hat is quoting this: Melville stripped the crime film down to ritual, silence and a trench coat.
★ 8.1
Before Sunset
Directed by Richard Linklater
2004
Very little else works the way this does: eighty minutes of two people walking around Paris talking, in close to real time, and it is over far too soon.
★ 8.0
Cleo from 5 to 7
Directed by Agnes Varda
1962
Varda was the one woman the New Wave could not leave out, and this is her breakthrough: ninety minutes of a singer walking Paris, waiting on news.
★ 8.0
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)
Directed by Marcel Carne
1945 · France
France's greatest film, and its Jewish designer and composer worked in hiding under German occupation: three hours of theater, mime and love among people who cannot afford it.
★ 7.7
Cache (Hidden)
Directed by Michael Haneke
2005 · France
The most quietly frightening film anyone has made about guilt: videotapes of a family's own front door start arriving, and Haneke cares far more about what nobody says.
★ 7.7
Amour
Directed by Michael Haneke
2012 · France
The film everyone should see once and nobody wants to see twice: Haneke barely leaves one Paris apartment while a marriage of decades reaches its last stretch.
★ 7.5
Belle de Jour
Directed by Luis Bunuel
1967
Bunuel's most seductive film, and the role Deneuve never quite escaped: a bored bourgeois wife takes afternoon work in a brothel, and her fantasies blur in without warning.
★ 7.5
Play Time
Directed by Jacques Tati
1967 · France
Tati built a working modern city on the edge of Paris and it bankrupted him: there is no plot, no close-up, and something funny in every corner of the frame.
★ 7.1
La Haine
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz
1995
France spent a year arguing over it and the government screened it for ministers: twenty-four hours with three young men in a Paris suburb after a riot.
★ 7.0
Amelie
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
2001 · France
The most exported French film of its generation: Jeunet saturated Paris into green and gold and sent a shy waitress out to quietly rearrange other people's lives.
★ 7.0
L'Atalante
Directed by Jean Vigo
1934 · France
Vigo was dying at twenty-nine when he finished it and the studio hacked it apart anyway: restored, it is the most sensual thing ever filmed about being newly married on a working barge.
★ 6.8
Rififi
Directed by Jules Dassin
1955 · France
Dassin was blacklisted out of Hollywood and made this in France for almost nothing: the half-hour robbery at its center plays in near-total silence, and the genre has been imitating it since.
★ 6.5
Midnight in Paris
Directed by Woody Allen
2011
Woody Allen's biggest hit at the box office is also his gentlest: a screenwriter stuck on a novel steps into a car at midnight in Paris and is driven straight into the 1920s.
★ 6.3
Band of Outsiders
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1964 · France
Tarantino named his production company after this film: three young Parisians run through the Louvre in nine minutes and dance the Madison in a cafe, and Godard makes crime look like play.
★ 6.1
An American in Paris
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
1951
It ends with a seventeen-minute ballet and no dialogue, staged against sets copied from French painters: Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli bet a whole musical on one uninterrupted dance.
★ 6.0
The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et La Putain)
Directed by Jean Eustache
1973 · France
Nearly four hours of three people talking in Paris apartments, and nothing else defines what happened after 1968 so exactly: Eustache made it once and never made anything like it again.
★ 5.8
Dangerous Liaisons
Directed by Stephen Frears
1988
Glenn Close and John Malkovich play two aristocrats who ruin people for entertainment: Frears films eighteenth-century seduction as a campaign with objectives, and the wit stays lethal to the end.
★ 5.5
Hugo
Directed by Martin Scorsese
2011
Scorsese made a children's film in 3D to argue for film preservation: an orphan living inside a Paris railway station keeps a broken automaton his father left him, and the station watches him.
★ 5.5
The Intouchables
Directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano
2011 · France
A French box office phenomenon built on two performances: a quadriplegic aristocrat hires a man from the projects precisely because he refuses to be careful around him, and Omar Sy took the Cesar.
★ 4.6
Last Tango in Paris
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
1972
Pauline Kael called the premiere a landmark comparable to the Rite of Spring, and the reputation has since collapsed: Maria Schneider was nineteen and was not told the scene had been changed.
★ 4.0
Les Miserables
Directed by Tom Hooper
2012
Every note was sung live on set instead of lip-synced to a recording, which nobody had attempted at this scale: the camera sits inches from faces the entire time.
★ 3.5
Funny Face
Directed by Stanley Donen
1957
Richard Avedon served as visual consultant and shot the photographs himself: Audrey Hepburn is a bookshop clerk turned Paris model, and the darkroom sequence is the most beautiful red ever filmed.
★ 3.0
Gigi
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
1958
It won all nine awards it was nominated for, the biggest clean sweep the Oscars had seen: Lerner and Loewe wrote it straight for the screen, and Paris in 1900 looks fabulously expensive.
★ 2.2
La Chienne
Directed by Jean Renoir
1931 · France
Jean Renoir was recording live street sound in 1931 when almost nobody could: a meek bank cashier who paints on Sundays falls for a woman he meets one night in Montmartre.
★ 2.0