French
Articles and Essays on French Films
Army of Shadows (1969)
Jean-Pierre Melville’s most personal film Army of Shadows is a bleak, brutal and sad film that tells the true story on several members of the French Resistance who secretly tried to defeat the Nazi party. Unlike Melville’s other films that usually involve calm and cool anti-heroes, daring police chases and thrilling heists, the characters in Army of Shadows are […]
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Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
Hiroshima mon amour is one of the great poetic French films of all time that also became the major catalyst for the French New Wave using several innovative techniques such as several flashbacks, documentary footage and it’s uniquely non linear storyline. Hiroshima mon amour was directed by the great French director Alain Resnais, and with a remarkable screenplay by Marguerite Duras, (which […]
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Wages of Fear, The (1953)
In one of the most nerve-racking thrillers ever made, Henry-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear is like a full frontal assault on a viewers senses with its heart pounding suspense and unrelenting tension. Four men drive two trucks of nitroglycerin three hundred miles across a hellish landscape full of potholes, rock-stewn passes, rickety bridges and dangerously tight turns to […]
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Rififi (1955)
American director Jules Dassin has crafted one of the greatest French heist thrillers of all time with Rififi, creating a noir gangster story constructed around a 33 minute safe cracking sequence, which was duplicated and copied several times after and yet never surpassed. The story of veteran criminals that gather a group of specialists together to carry out […]
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Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
Vivre Sa Vie (or in English titled My Life to Live), is the tragic story on a woman’s slow descent into prostitution and death. Directed by the legendary Jean-Luc Godard, he divides the film into 12 tableaux, very similar to a novel. The actress who plays the character of Nana is the beautiful and legendary Anna Karina […]
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