André Wilms

Aki Kaurismäki returns to France with this sun-kissed utopian parable. One of his most politically resonant films, Le Havre echoes The Man Without a Past’s ruminations on community and resilience, albeit this time (via a hat tip to Carl Dreyer’s Ordet) with a nod to the vagaries of the divine.

A painter named Louis and his wife Michelle, have been experiencing strange events. The universe around them seems to be changing. Slowly, furniture, objects, and people lose their realism.

An intimate portrait of a woman drifting between reality and denial when she's left to grapple with the consequences of her husband's imprisonment.

Three struggling artists try to make passable livings in Paris despite knock backs and tragedies.

A young girl is brutally murdered. The prime suspect is a cold and reclusive man who is obsessed with his beautiful neighbor. He spends his nights watching her through his window, but when she discovers that she is being spied on, she becomes the aggressor in an erotically charged relationship that leads to a deadly game.

A former sex addict working as a marriage counselor becomes smitten by his sex-obsessed assistant while he desperately tries to put love first.

In 1930s Paris, an actress famous for her gory death scenes at the Grand Guignol Theater contends with a mysterious stalker and ghosts from her past.

In this mysterious tale, a family welcomes a baby with an unusual gift causing suspicion, intrigue and doubt to arise.

Veteran filmmaker Philippe Garrel once again fashions a pinpoint-precise and economical study of young love and its prevarications, which ever so gradually blossoms into an emotionally resonant moral tale. Handsome Luc, following in his aging father’s footsteps to study the craft of furniture joining, doesn’t appear to have any trouble meeting and dating women; as the film opens he’s aggressively courting Djemila at a Paris bus stop. Skeptical yet ultimately trusting, Djemila will not be Luc’s one and only. Constructed and composed with crystalline austerity, and co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière and Arlette Langmann—who collaborated on Garrel’s last two films—The Salt of Tears is a pocket portrait that demonstrates the persistent vitality of one of French cinema’s great observers of the callowness of youth.

An outrageously wicked comedy about two families from award winning debut filmmaker Étienne Chatiliez, this fast-paced satire became the most popular French comedy of the decade. The radiantly bourgeois Le Quesnoys with their immaculate children and perfect manners and the grubby, disreputable Groseilles are thrown together in absurd chaos by an act of revenge as they discover that twelve years prior their babies were switched at birth. A witty send up of class relations and family ties, 'Life Is a Long Quiet River' was celebrated with a host of trophies at France's César Awards ceremony winning for best screenplay, best debut work and acting prizes for Hélène Vincent and Catherine Jacob.

A young Parisian couple with Polish-Jewish roots makes their first trip to their ancestral homeland with very different outlooks and expectations.