15 Best French Movies on Amazon Prime

Autobiographical in nature, 120 BPM is French screenwriter Robin Campillo’s first feature film. It revolves around the Parisian chapter of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP, which Campillo was a member of in the early 1990s, and the love between Nathan, the group’s newest member, who is HIV negative, and Sean, one of its founding and more radical members, who is positive and suffers the consequences of contracting AIDS. Using fake blood and spectacular direct action, ACT UP advocated more and better research of treatment, prevention, and awareness. This was at a time when many, implicitly or explicitly, viewed AIDS as a gay disease, even as a punishment for the gay community’s propensity to pleasure and partying. The latter is reflected by the film’s title, 120 bpm being the average number of beats per minute of a house track. Arnaud Rebotini’s original score echoes the ecstasy-driven house music hedonism of the time with some effective original cuts, albeit with a melancholic streak. Because, for all the love, friendship, and emotion of the ACT UP crew that BPM so passionately portrays, anger and sadness pervade the lives of these young people as the lack of effective treatment threatens to claim the lives of their loved ones.

What was popular back then isn’t popular today for a reason. In film, that’s because the technology’s improved, the audience gets too used to the trend, and what once worked fades into the background. Once in a while, however, someone brings back nostalgia for a certain style. This happened when filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius created The Artist. Set in the transition between silent film and talkies, The Artist cleverly takes on the silent film form, but makes it suitable for today’s moviegoers. The ears are never left empty, thanks to the bouts of score and few foley that focuses attention. The camera shoots mostly in black and white, but shoots in various styles across the Golden Age. Even the story itself is classic melodrama– Sunset Boulevards and A Star is Born comes to mind– but it’s treated with the genre mixing the 2010s started to play with, the postmodern revue that recontextualizes the past. The Artist brings back what cinema has long discarded, and remembers what made these styles classic.

It’s always fun to watch something that makes you second guess each move, that shifts seamlessly from one thing to another. Frantz is that kind of film, and as the deceptively simple premise unfolds—a widow befriends her late husband’s friend—you’re never really sure if what you’re watching is a romance, a mystery, or a sly combination of both.

It helps that Frantz is also more than just a period piece, packed as it is with tiny but thoughtful details. When it is filled with color, for example, it does so in the muted palette of 1900s portraits, making each shot look like a picture come to life. When it talks about love, it goes beyond heterosexual norms and hints at something more potent and, at times, political. And when it takes a swing at melodrama, its actors ground the moment with enough restraint and reserve so that it never teeters on excess. All this results in a well-executed, gripping, and overall lovely film to watch.

Other People’s Children wrestles with some very tricky life experiences: bonding with a partner’s child in the agonizing knowledge that that attachment is entirely contingent on the fate of your romantic relationship; being a woman of a certain age and wanting a child but becoming keenly aware of the ticking of your body clock. For all the sharp points of pain the movie zones in on, though, there is remarkable cheerfulness in it, too. Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski captures a wide spectrum of mood here, fusing lighthearted laughs and swooning romance with bitter disappointments and grief in a way that feels organic to life itself. The buoyant moments don’t undermine the sincere, intelligent consideration given to Rachel’s (Virginie Efira) perspective as a woman navigating a situation for which there are no real rules, and vice versa — because the film considers her as a whole from the outset. Neither reducing Rachel to her childlessness nor ignoring its emotional impact on her, this is a deeply empathetic movie that never questions the completeness of its protagonist’s life.

Despite being based on a 19th-century serial novel, Lost Illusions feels remarkably close to contemporary concerns about fake news and the devaluing of art for profit. But as the story is also, obviously, set in the 19th century, all this bribery and these backdoor dealings are done entirely through the written word and by sending runners from one Parisian theater to the next—and the result is uniquely thrilling. Nearly every character is a terrible person (like in an old-timey Goodfellas way) and it can get tiring seeing the film glorify their hustle, but the energy it brings is rare to find in any other period drama.

Demian Bichir was nominated for an Oscar for his role in this movie where he plays an illegal immigrant and father. You might be wondering “who is that?”, but trust me you won’t after watching this movie. The kindness, complexity, and authenticity he brings to this story are unparalleled.

A Better Life is about the illegal immigrant experience, about the line between the fear of being caught and the aspiration for a better future. It’s an excellent and important movie. 

This anthology of 18 short films — directed by the likes of the Coen brothers, Gurinder Chadha, Wes Craven, and Olivier Assayas — is a cinematic charcuterie board. Each director offers their own creative interpretation of one north star: love in Paris. Romantic love is heavily represented, naturally, but in diverse forms: love that’s run its course, dormant love in need of rekindling, electric chance encounters, and, apt given the location, honeymoon love. Segments like the one starring Juliette Binoche and Alfonso Cuarón’s five-minute-long continuous take opt to focus on parental love instead, with the former also exploring love through the frame of grief. 

If this all sounds a little syrupy and sentimental, fear not: there are dashes of bubble-bursting humor from the Coens, whose short stars a silent Steve Buscemi as a stereotypically Mona Lisa-obsessed American tourist who commits a grave faux pas in a metro station. Instead of sightseers, some directors offer more sober reflections on the experience of migrants in the city, which help ground the film so it doesn’t feel quite so indulgent. Still, the limited runtime of each vignette (sub-10 minutes) doesn’t let any one note linger too long, meaning the anthology feels like a series of light, short courses rather than a gorge of something sickly.

When depicting war and faith, it seems like men are the only ones that have to undertake these challenges, at least it seems, in the stories made available about these topics. But that simply isn’t true. The Innocents is one of the few reminders that, while women might have been kept from the front lines, war has spared no one. Through stark and wintry shots, and a solemn direction, writer-director Anne Fontaine crafts tense conversations between an atheist doctor and her nun patients, making all of them reckon with the ways trauma has shifted their present principles and future actions, in a sensitive way that has rarely been seen before. While the resolution can come across as a bit too sudden, The Innocents nonetheless is a compelling study of faith.

With plenty of old men having extramarital affairs, taking advantage of younger women and leaving them forlorn in love, it can feel deceptively easy to take sides in the first forty minutes of He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not. Who wouldn’t side with Angélique, especially with the innocent, childlike face of Audrey Tautou? And yet, when the twist occurs, the film fills the gaps in totally unexpected ways, gradually escalating to a terrible and sad conclusion about this seemingly romantic girl. It’s hard to further talk about He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not without getting into spoiler territory, so if this is the first time you’ve heard of the movie, go and watch it without any context.

This easy French rom-com from 2006 is about Jean, a poor barman played Gad Elmaleh, who lies about his profession to date Irène, played by Audrey Tautou.

Irène has the habit of dating wealthy men to fund her lifestyle, she quickly realizes that Jean does not fit that description. Determined to do everything he can to win her over, Jean himself starts dating wealthy women.

Priceless, or Hors de prix, is a fun and light romcom with excellent lead performances.

It’s obvious that there’s an inequality between the sexes, but while knowing the problem is helpful, it can be tough to figure out how to solve it. One solution is to withhold something from men that women have control over, and in some cases, that something is sex. Inspired by a real life sex strike in Turkey over the water supply, The Source makes the strange choice to adapt Greek comedy Lysistrata in an unspecified North African town instead. But strange choice aside, the script takes the premise and expands it not just to address the initial war and water issues, but also to expound on many more issues tied to inequality such as women’s literacy, domestic labor, as well as domestic violence. The Source is unsubtle, but the cast’s performances make the film an interesting Lysistrata adaptation.

Most people can easily acknowledge the atrocities Nazi Germany did in World War II, but Germany didn’t do them alone. It is a world war, after all. Sarah’s Key confronts that painful past through a journalist investigating a possible Holocaust survivor. Admittedly, alternating between 2009 and 1942 made the film a bit uneven, with the well-researched past proving to be more compelling than the present. Still, the film adaptation of the powerful novel powerfully reckons with the way Vichy France was complicit in this terrible time. Sarah’s Key isn’t perfect, but it’s an important reminder to acknowledge the history that continues to shape us, especially when it’s something we would rather forget.

A thrilling French movie about a nuclear submarine division that is confronted with a world-ending scenario.

One sonar agent is at the center of the story, his exceptional hearing capabilities are the main resource of the submarine commanders he works for (one of whom is played by the masterful Reda Kateb).

Wolf’s Call tries very hard to be a Hollywood movie, but even if it serves as a reminder that countries like France don’t have to always make arthouse films to be noticed, the visual effects and the writing fall short of that big-budget feel.

Still, if you’re looking for a fun movie that’s full of surprises, solid acting, and a great heroism tale, you’ll love this.

Much like its monster, Brotherhood of the Wolf is quite a hard movie to pin down. It’s an unscary French creature feature but it’s a rather refreshing period drama romance, made much more action-packed courtesy of a randomly placed, supposedly Iroquois, talented martial artist. Yet somehow, it works. Perhaps it works because it was released ahead of many other early aughts action horror films, and perhaps, at CGI’s infancy, it’s a bit easier to suspend disbelief over the wolf, but the wacky experimentation writer-director Christophe Gans brings in depicting this historical beast is just so entertaining to watch. Brotherhood of the Wolf is just pure bonkers.

Why do we cling to the people that we love, but who clearly don’t treat us well? It’s a common question in romance films, one that often leads to a conclusion that people shouldn’t feel shackled to partners that don’t treat them right, but sometimes other films seem to shame these unfortunate lovers for making the wrong choice. My King doesn’t do that. Sure, Georgio can seem like an obvious asshole (he is), but writer-director Maïwenn makes clear that the same things that make him erratic– his spontaneity, his enjoyment of life, and his open acceptance– which Vincent Cassel superbly embodies, are also the same things that attracted Tony in the first place. And as Tony recovers her knee, the careful interstitching between her time at the center and her romance with Georgio visually parallels the physical and emotional wounds in an interesting way. Mon Roi is familiar romance stuff, but it’s the approach that makes the film work.