To watch movies in French is an excellent way to practice your comprehension skills or just to familiarize you with the French language. I would suggest a few games: to repeat the lines for pronunciation (watch the characters' lips if it helps), to watch the movie without the subtitles (for more advanced students),or to act out the scenes to feel what it's like to be French! (just joking!). Here is also a complete index of French movies.
Regarder des films en français est une excellente manière de pratiquer votre compréhension ou simplement de vous familiariser avec la langue française. Je suggèrerais quelques jeux: de répéter le dialogue pour la prononciation (regardez les lèvres des personnages si ça vous aide), de regarder le film sans les sous-tîtres (pour les étudiants plus avancés), ou de jouer les scènes pour sentir ce que c'est que d'être français (je rigole!). Voici aussi un index complet de films français.
Famille | Comédie | Série Noire | Drame | Fantastique | Autres
Films pour enfants ou pour la famille/Children's or family films
La belle et la bête
("Beauty and the Beast" Jean Cocteau, 1946, with Jean Marais)Fairytale. Considered an escapist film, ignoring the horrors of World War II that had just gone by and taking refuge in the imaginary world.
Conte de fée.
Peau d'âne
Fairytale. Conte de fee.Jeux Interdits
La boum
Coming of age film.Diabolo Menthe
Coming of age film.Kirikou et la sorcière
(Animation by Michel Ocelot, based on an African tale, music by Youssou N'dour)This is the kind of animation film I would want my children to watch. The drawings are very pretty, the story is intelligent. It is very poetic and beautiful.
Voici le genre de dessin animé que
je voudrais que mes enfants voient. Les dessins sont très beaux
et l'histoire intelligente.
Taxi
(Producteur: Luc Besson)Fun action movie.
Taxi 2
(Producteur: Luc Besson)Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain
Comédies
La nuit americaine
("Day for Night" by Francois Truffaut, 1973)La cage aux folles
Le père Noël est une ordure
Le dîner de cons
La grande bouffe
La vie est un long fleuve tranquille
An entertaining and touching social comedy carricaturing a bourgeois family and a lower class family: their sons had gotten exchanged at birth and they go back to their biological parents after 12 years of living the opposite lifestyle.Robert et Robert
Marius et Jeanette
Romantic comedy, Marseille style. Sweet.Nationale 7
(2000)An incredible nurse in an hospital for the physically impaired went to the most extreme odds in order to help out a patient in desperate need for feminine affection... (based on a true story, where the nurse was the director's sister) Wonderful characters and humour.
Chaos
Série noire/Thrillers
Les Diaboliques
(Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955, with Simonne Signoret)Thriller. Psychological horror, came out one year before Hitchcock'sÿ Psycho and had tremendous success. Clouzot was called the "French Hitchcock." It supposedly influenced Hitchcock to make Psycho, partially to reclaim his title.
Tirez sur le pianiste
(Francois Truffaut)C'est arrivé près de chez vous
Horrible dreadful terrifying mockumentary of a burglar and occasional murderer. We enter his psychology as we follow him and he describes his lifestyle like a carpenter would describe his job, so naturally and openly. Very disturbing. (In the same sort of vein as "Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien").Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien
("With a Friend Like Harry", 2000)Very disturbing psychological horror film. I would rather say nothing about the story because it is so twisted and surprising.
La Moustache
(Emmanuel Carrère, 2005)Most people who came out of the theatre looked very puzzled. So, what really happened? What was this all about? they wondered... A man has been wearing a moustache for very many years and his whole sense of identity seemed to revolve around his moustache. One day he decides to shave it off but noone around him notices, neither his wife, his friends, nor his colleagues.... so that is how this thriller is set off... very open to many interpretations, (can) make you think about self-identity, the discrepancies between our perceptions and reality, the insignificance and significance of things and of oneself, dreams, reality, perceptions, self-perception...
Drames/Dramas
L'Atalante
La grande illusion
(Jean Renoir, 1937, with Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim, "the director whose films most influenced Renoir")A great classic. A film on WW I, dealing with a two deserters, remarkable by the way it explores human relationships in a time of fear and turmoil.
Un grand classique. Un film sur la guerre de 14, à propos de deux déserteurs, remarquable par la manière dont il explore les rapports humains en une èpôque de peur et de trouble.
Les enfants du paradis
("Children of Paradise", Marcel Carmé, 1945, dialogues by poet Jacques Prévert)A classic!A very romantic film of intertwined impossible loves.
Un
classique! Un film très romantiques d'amours impossibles entremêlées.
Les 400 coups
(Francois Truffaut, 1959)Autobiographical. Childhood memories. Sweet painting of the forties in France.
Autobiographique. Souvenirs d'enfance. Belle peinture des annees 40 en France.
Victor, l'enfant sauvage
(Francois Truffaut)Jean de Florette (part I of Manon des Sources)
Manon des Sources (part II of Jean de Florette)
(with Emmanuelle Béart, Daniel Auteuil)Provencal author Marcel Pagnol's classic novels taken to the screen. Two classics.
Adèle H
(Francois Truffaut)The story of Victor Hugo's daughter and the strong relationship between them two. This movie had a very strong impression on me when I was little.
Mauvais Sang
(with Denis Lavant)Un homme et une femme
Subway
(Luc Besson)L'effrontee
(with Charlotte Gainsbourg)La petite voleuse
(with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anouk Grimberg)Sans toit ni loi
(by Agnes Varda)Nikita
(Luc Besson)As much psychological violence as physical one. Disturbing and very sad.
37'2
("Betty Blue", with Beatrice Dalle, Christophe Malavoy)Very dramatic love story, very feverish, blue indeed.
Au revoir les enfants
Toto le heros
Strange, childhood love between a boy and his older sister never really vanishes.La sentinelle
(Belgium)Strange, a la derive (drifting). We discover a face behind the mask of a bourgeois family where everything would seem so secure and perfect.
La Haine
(Matthieu Kassovitz)La vie de Jesus
(1999?)It's actually a terrible movie, it's sickening, calls for suicide, you'll want to throw up. But it's interesting as a document of the French youth gasping, desperate, hopeless and so sick.
Rosetta Rosetta
(1999?)This is another horrible film, not made for the main audience, but rather for crazy masochistic film viewers, it's really a torture. It made me want to throw up for a week after I saw it. The reason I mention it here along with "La vie de Jesus" is that I was surprised to watch such desperate films from my fellow countrymen from here, LA, abroad, and yet I know some of that feeling. It's like being stuck in the mud with some smells of smoke and booze, and perhaps distant vomit, and no hand to help you get out (just like in one of the very significant scenes where the mother falls in a muddy pond and her daughter just ignores her). It's another sort of psychological horror.
The main character is selfish, self-centered, depressive, desperate.
La vie revee des anges
(1999)This movie also expresses the French youth's despair and suicidal tendencies but has more hope, is sweeter, gentle, and more reassuring. It's quite sad but hopeful.
L'emploi du temps
(2000, Time Out)A middle-class man loses his job after having lost interest in it for a while. He does not tell his family (his wife and two children) and pretends to have found a great post in Switzerland. It is very heartening to see this man struggle with a social drama that he no longer desires, trapped in his life as a rat in a cage. The film was not shown in Japan because it questioned the value of work!
Exils
(Tony Gatliff, 2004)Vivid, colorful, a journey to the source for two individuals. So alive!
Fantastique et science fiction/Fantasy and science fiction
Le voyage dans la lune
("Trip to the Moon", Georges Melies, 1902)The first science-fiction movie that I have heard of. Extroardinarily creative and funny in spite of the limited means of the time!
Le premier film de science fiction a ma connaissance. Extraordinairement creatif et drole malgre les moyens limites de l'epoque!
Le sang d'un poete
("Blood of a poet" Jean Cocteau, 1930)Very experimental. The life and death of a statue, the blood of a poet, and allegories of war... very surrealist.
Tres experimental. La vie et la mort d'une statue, le sang d'un poete, et des allegories de la guerre... Tres surrealiste.
La planete sauvage
("Fantastic Planet", Animation, 1970's)Crazy psychedelic sci-fi animation.
Le dernier combat
(Luc Besson)Luc Besson's first feature. Black & White. Apocalyptic but simplistic.
Delicatessen
(Jean-Pierre Genet)Crazy, dark humor, post-modernistic tale of a little apartment building, where tenants mysteriously disappear. Very unique and very stylized.
Historical films
Le retour de Martin Guerre
La reine Margot
Autres/Others
Masculin Feminin
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)Intellectual social wondering/wandering of the 60's, Godard style.
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
("The Gleaners and I", Agnes Varda)Fascinating and strange documentary about gleaners from Manet's painting to modern day urban gleaners who pick up leftovers after the market, or such.