The Best Movies to Watch In French on Hulu
With the most successful film industry outside of the United States, France has given us everything from easy comedies to Cannes-winning oeuvres. If you want to brush up on your français, here are the best movies featuring the French language.
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The worst possible things that could happen, happen to orphaned twins Gracie and Gilbert but still they power on, motivated solely by the hope of being reunited once more. It’s a sweet premise, young siblings on opposite ends of the country encouraging one another with heartfelt letters. And with the soft-spoken Gracie (Snook) narrating the […]
You would expect a courtroom drama to be built around damning pieces of evidence, passionate speeches, or certain social issues lending weight to the investigation. But what makes Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall so remarkable is how direct it is. Triet doesn’t treat this case like a puzzle for the audience to […]
Fire of Love is a documentary that follows Maurice and Katia Krafft, a scientist couple who’ve dedicated their entire professional lives to studying (and marveling at) volcanoes. The two met at university and have been inseparable ever since, chasing explosions around the world until their death at the Mount Unzen eruption in 1991. The fiery […]
Nothing about Saint Omer is easy. A female Senegalese migrant (Guslagie Malanga) is put to trial for committing infanticide, but throughout the film, it becomes clear how much of a victim she is too, of an uncaring and deeply prejudiced society. “What drove her to madness?” Her attorney asks at one point. We’re not sure. […]
It’s heartbreaking to realize that Happening, a film set in 1960s France tracking a young woman’s journey to dangerously and desperately terminating her pregnancy, is still very much relevant and relatable to this day. Around the world, abortion is still inaccessible, if not completely illegal, and women still struggle to lay full claim to their […]
La Chimera is often meandering. Scenes flitter about and move at different paces, resembling dreams more than they do reality, but they’re hardly trivial. Just the opposite, they enchant you with their beauty and confront you with deep, existential questions that haunt you long after the film’s run. You won’t find obvious answers here though, […]
When Cristobal Balenciaga was in his prime, the courtier was lauded for his technique. More than anything, his dedication to the tiniest detail of dressmaking, not just design, made his sculptural dresses stand out. This titular miniseries about his years in Paris is made in the same vein. It has a strong foundational form, from […]
Becoming Karl Lagerfeld gets many things right—the fashion is spectacular, the drama is gripping, and the details feel true to the time. It’s never over-the-top and cartoonish, which seems to be a problem in most other biopics. But for all it has going for it, Brühl is the real star of the show. He seems […]
If it’s true that to cook is to love, then Dodin and Eugenie must be enraptured by one another. They use the exquisite language of food to express their feelings for one another, and watching their exchange, you can’t help but feel honored, if not embarrassed, to witness such an intimate and love-filled act. Food […]
Diane von Furstenberg has no doubt lived a rich, fascinating life, but the documentary struggles to strike a balanced tone and instead comes off as an advertisement of DVF’s (admittedly beautiful) dresses. It’s not that the designer doesn’t merit the glowing praise given to her by friends, family, and experts in the documentary, but that […]
Kenneth Branagh’s third Hercule Poirot movie does everything it can to divorce itself from the quaintness of a typical Agatha Christie adaptation. Loosely based on the novel Hallowe’en Party, this outing swaps exotic locales for the claustrophobic confines of a gothic Venetian palazzo and flirts outright with horror. The film, shot through more Dutch angles […]
Among the sea of class satires released in the last year, Triangle of Sadness is one of the better ones. Directed by Ruben Östlund (The Square, Force Majeure), the film follows an ultra-rich group of people who get stranded on an island after their luxury cruise ship sinks. The social pyramid that has long favored […]
At 80 minutes, Smoking Causes Coughing is another slice of perfectly paced absurdist fun from Quentin Dupieux, the zany mind behind Rubber (in which a car tire turns serial killer) and Deerskin, the tale of a motorcycle jacket that wants to rule the world. This time around, the protagonists aren’t inanimate objects: they’re Tobacco Force, […]
You don’t have to watch (or even be aware of) the The Squad: Home Run’s 2015 predecessor to understand this sequel, because there just isn’t enough to care about in the film’s halfhearted action scenes and rudimentary mystery-solving. Even as it promises an interesting dynamic between ex-cop Niels Cartier (played by Alban Lenoir) and his […]
More a showcase of various styles of animation than an expansion of Star Wars lore (and all the better for it), Visions finds some of the freshest expression for these tired tropes—rendered in what are easily the best visuals this franchise has ever seen. Across the 18 episodes of its first two seasons, the series […]
Watch this if you like weird movies. And don’t be fooled by the first half, which serves just to set Jesse Eisenberg’s character and the monotone life he leads. It’s the calm before the storm, during which that character is attacked by a violent gang and decides to take self-defense classes in an unusual club. […]
More simply called La Vie d’Adèle in its native language, this French coming-of-age movie was hugely successful when it came out and was probably one of the most talked-about films of the time. On the one hand, the usual puritans came to the fore, criticizing the lengthy and graphic sex scenes. On the other hand, […]
How is it possible to fit a whole lifetime into a movie? Mira Nair’s The Namesake, an adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s beloved novel, excels in doing so, gliding through the book’s plot with ease, but it’s done in a subtle and straightforward way that makes it feel less complex than it really is. The scenes […]
If it weren’t for his knack for writing, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) would never have gotten into a prep school like Rushmore. But his art secures him a scholarship, and what he lacks in smarts and money, he makes up for in school pride. As he flunks more and more of his academics, however, he […]
A seemingly well-adjusted Scandinavian Family vacationing in the French Alps experiences a frightening avalanche scare near the beginning of Force Majeure, thereby unleashing a cacophony of mistrust and anxiety as their dynamic is shaken to the core. This pitch black comedy from Sweden charts the steady disintegration of the family unit and the father’s psyche […]
