Using familiar genre tropes to tackle provocative themes, this shot-in-Istanbul, Cairo-set Cannes Best Screenplay winner asks hard questions about the troubling intersections between political and religious institutions.
Kechiche’s work about the real-life 19th-century racial and sexual exploitation of an African woman as an ethnic curiosity is bound to offend, but it is solid as a biopic that tackles the inherent voyeurism of the colonial gaze.
Godard collaborates with Jean-Pierre Leaud in this rarely-seen TV movie whose reach would have surely escaped its audience as the iconoclastic auteur philosophises the end of cinema, complications of production and the malleability of video aesthetics in his inimitable esoteric style.
Exquisitely hand-painted frame by frame, this French-language arthouse animation is bleak yet hopeful, about two young siblings who are forced to leave their home in order to flee from war and persecution in Eastern Europe.
Becker’s swansong is one of the most underrated based-on-a-true-story prison escape movies in world cinema—its simple, efficient storytelling style hides a highly-detailed narrative that propels the story forwards through plot and action.
One of Gremillon’s best-known works, this part sea action, part romance drama strikes a strong emotional chord with its performances and melodramatic flair.
A fascinating feature debut by Dumont, who captures the tedium of French countryside life by finding beauty in the mundane and the horrific in the nonchalant, working with non-professional actors with aplomb.
Bresson’s ‘Joan of Arc’ film is as spare and minimalist as you can imagine, distilling with startling clarity the moral essence of one of history’s most infamous trials.
A well-paced and engaging genre effort by Renoir that mixes psychological drama with the crime-noir, featuring Jean Gabin and Simone Simon as doomed lovers.
There are two Robert Kleins (one’s a Jew) in WWII Nazi-occupied France in this slow-burning, finely-tuned Kafkaesque wrong identity mystery-thriller, starring a paranoid Alain Delon.
Eternality Tan 