Although the latter part of his career was blighted by some notable
misfires and unfair comparison with the work of his younger
contemporaries (New Wave directors such as François Truffaut)... [More...]
With two successful crime dramas under his belt, director Edouard Molinaro stays
with the genre and delivers what is quite possibly his darkest and most
stylish film... [More...]
Inspired by a popular novel by René Havard, Un
taxi pour Tobrouk is a classic French war film that shows the brutality and absurdity
of war without slipping into sentimentality or laboured anti-war polemic... [More...]
The multi-part film is a difficult kind of cinema to get right but Duvivier’s
Le Diable et les dix commandements is a rare exception where the form succeeds admirably... [More...]
What was originally envisaged as a serious gangster thriller ended up as a classy comedy
thriller, the first in what would become a popular sub-genre in French cinema in the late
1960s... [More...]
Director Henri Verneuil originally conceived this film as a latter day
Gallic western, with lorries replacing horses, and the North African
landscape making a plausible substitute for the American
mid-west... [More...]
After the huge success of Les Tontons flingueurs, an outrageously funny parody
of the gangster film, the director-writer team Georges Lautner and Michel Audiard repeated
their winning formula with Les Barbouzes... [More...]
Although his first action thriller,
Classe tous risques, was ill-received by both critics and cinema goers, director
Claude Sautet persevered a made a second film in the same genre... [More...]
La Métamorphose des cloportes is a typically
French comedy policier of the kind that was very popular in the mid-1960s. After
the success of Georges Lautner’s 1963 film
Les Tontons flingueurs... [More...]
The familiar Jean-Pierre Melville themes of honour, loyalty and redemption underpin this hard-edged
policier which sees the formidable pairing of Lino Ventura and Paul Meurisse... [More...]
A striking combination of action thriller and sardonic western, Les Grandes gueules is
probably the French film that comes closest in style and substance to the tough Hollywood
cowboy films of the 1950s and 1960s... [More...]
In this film, director Jean-Pierre Melville draws on his own war-time experiences to paint
a vivid and realistic picture of life in the French Resistance during the Second World
War... [More...]
