French cinema gave the world the Nouvelle Vague, but its adventurousness runs far deeper, from the philosophical strangeness of Fantastic Planet to the quiet alienation of The Man Who Sleeps. France has long rewarded directors who treat film as a genuinely literary form, and that spirit runs through everything here. See what Macca made of it below.
Rating: 3.0★
Jean Rouch occupies a peculiar corner of film history, one that gets cited constantly in academic circles but rarely makes it onto a Friday night watchlist. A French ethnographer turned filmmaker, he spent decades in West Africa, developing what he came to call ethnofiction, a practice that sat somewhere between
Rating: 4.0★
Euzhan Palcy's Sugar Cane Alley arrived in 1983 as something of a landmark, not just for Caribbean cinema but for French-language filmmaking more broadly. Set in Martinique during the early 1930s, the film draws on Joseph Zobel's 1950 autobiographical novel La Rue Cases-Nègres, a
Rating: 2.5★
There is a long and restless tradition in world cinema of using the horror genre as a vessel for social and political anxieties, particularly around bodies, identity, and the pressures of conformity. From the body-horror provocations of Cronenberg through to the folk-inflected dread of more recent European and
Rating: 3.5★
Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name arrived in 2017 as one of the most talked-about films of that awards season, and it has barely been out of the conversation since. Based on André Aciman's 2007 novel of the same name, the story is set
Rating: 3.0★
Chad is not a country you would typically associate with a thriving film industry, and that context matters when watching Lingui, the Sacred Bonds. The country gained independence from France in 1960, yet for decades its cultural output on screen remained negligible, constrained by poverty, political instability, and an almost
Rating: 1.5★
French Polynesia has served as a canvas for European fantasy and anxiety in equal measure ever since Gauguin packed his bags and headed for Tahiti in the 1890s. That long history of outsiders projecting their desires, their guilt, and their authority onto the islands and the people who live there
Rating: 2.5★
Robert Bresson occupies a singular position in the French cinema canon, a director so committed to his own aesthetic principles that his films feel less like conventional narratives and more like philosophical arguments made in moving images. By the time Pickpocket arrived in 1959, Bresson had already established himself as
Rating: 3.0★
February 1939 marked one of the most desperate mass movements of people in modern European history. As Franco's Nationalist forces closed in on the last Republican strongholds in Catalonia, somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 Spanish civilians and soldiers crossed the Pyrenees into France in a matter
Rating: 3.5★
The title alone tells you something about the world this film inhabits. "No Dogs or Italians Allowed" refers to the kind of signs that reportedly appeared outside lodgings and workplaces in early twentieth-century France, a blunt shorthand for the discrimination faced by the waves of Italian labourers
1970s
René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973) is one of those films that doesn’t really fit anywhere: too cerebral for kids, too odd for animation festivals, too steeped in European political theory for the Saturday-morning slot, and too visually fearless to ignore. A 72-minute French–Czech co-production
Genre Documentary
Letter from Siberia (1957)
Genre Documentary
Here and Elsewhere (1976)
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