10 Best French Movies of 2024  (2025)

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As is typically the case, France was one of the world’s biggest producers of movies in 2024, debuting a nonstop series of French features ranging from internationally acclaimed indies to locally embraced box office hits. Naturally, it’s the former category that tends to make the crossover to us non-local viewers every year, but this past year saw a particular crossover appeal for the films that made waves at home and saw a ripple effect echo across the seas. 2024 saw no shortage of French auteurs (re)staking their claims over the field, as well as fresh faces looking to earn their glory for the first time.

And while some of these names missed the mark, both old (Olivier Assayas, Bruno Dumont) and new (Agathe Riedinger), a country like France could never get to its current position as one of Europe’s most consistent exports of cinema without a heavy supply of names eager to create on a yearly basis, as well as an industry often willing to foster those visions. Due to the nation’s massive outreach in cinema, many of these films were, of course, not completely “French” in nature (“All We Imagine as Light” may have been shortlisted to be their Oscar submission, but it’s doubtful that anyone would look to that film as being quintessentially francophone). Regardless, the country still offered enough distinctly French films in 2024 to pick out 10 worth seeing.

(And no, after much thought, “Emilia Pérez” will not be making this list; while the argument that it’s better than some of the films lower on the list can certainly be entertained, Jacques Audiard’s vision is ultimately too scattershot, too unfulfilling, to ring as a full endorsement within the framework of a “best of” list.)

10. Savages

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Stop motion animation takes years of painstaking craft and effort to bring to life, so it should come as no shock that Claude Barras’s follow-up to the heartbreaking “My Life as a Zucchini” only came out this past year. While the new film is, undoubtedly, a vastly inferior offering to that clay-shaped masterpiece, “Savages” makes for a cute exploration of environmentalism all the same. Undeniably a kids’ film where “Zucchini” was an animated film aimed squarely at adults, “Savages” provides, in its simplistic messaging, a useful conduit through which children from across the world can contextualize their relationships with the natural world around them.

A co-production between all the French European nations (France, Switzerland, and Belgium), “Savages” places itself right in the direct line of French industrial expansionism, teaching children at a young age the necessity of questioning consumption at the expense of Indigenous populations and the lively, precious environments that surround them. Sure, Barras is somewhat twee in his moralizing, but “Savages” remains a visually sumptuous and delicately assembled piece of animation that proves the versatility of such mediums as crucial and stimulating avenues for the education of today’s youth.

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9. The Quiet Son

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For his performance in “The Quiet Son,” Vincent Lindon won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, a pairing that goes quite nicely with his much-deserved Cannes award for Best Actor for 2015’s “The Measure of a Man.” Ten minutes into Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s film is all you need to see why an actor of Lindon’s caliber is worthy of such accolades, as “The Quiet Son” asks of its lead a complex confluence of emotions in his gradual realization of his son’s radicalized views. A film about fighting to keep your family intact, the story rests upon Lindon’s shoulders as he bears the weight of a man balancing a desire to usher his children into the world against a growing resentment towards that world and the way it’s pulling them apart.

Surrounding Lindon is a film that does its best (if not always succeeding) to frame the character’s struggle within a greater context of needless hostility and growing right-wing sentiments of insecure exclusion, and “The Quiet Son” takes a necessary step in examining what this sort of fracture does to a family already on the ropes. The Coulin sisters bring urgency to that struggle—one borne from a shred of fraternal fragility.

8. The Most Precious of Cargoes

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For his first foray into animated cinema, French mainstay Michel Hazanavicius turned to a story close to his heart and decided to adapt Jean-Claude Gumberg’s novel “The Most Precious of Cargoes” to the big screen. The story of a remote woodcutter and his family who find an Auschwitz-bound baby thrown from a train, the film sticks to its novelistic roots (Gumberg co-wrote the screenplay with Hazanavicius) with a soft, almost pop-up book-style of animation, gradually deceptive in the horrific subject matter that eventually unravels.

Though somewhat slight overall, “The Most Precious of Cargoes” is nonetheless Hazanavicius’s most consistent and motivated project in years, examining well-worn but ever-welcome themes of found family and resilience in the face of atrocities that may very well come to define us. The first animated film to compete at the Cannes Film Festival since “Waltz with Bashir,” “The Most Precious of Cargoes” is certainly not the most thematically or narratively ambitious feature, but Hazanavicius still offers a rumination on the suffering caused by the Second World War that could prove to be a crucial starting point for any young person’s journey to discovering the atrocities of our collective past.

7. Misericordia

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Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia” surprised this year’s Cannes audience with a quiet but devilishly humorous view of steaming attraction and violence in a quaint village setting. Looking back at the film, Guiraudie’s approach is undoubtedly one distinctly European in its exploration of thinking with your libido, and the director is smart to play that element up for chuckles just as often as he does for sinister smirks. Aided by Félix Kysyl’s poker-faced performance, the film is able to live in that world of tepid sin and mushrooms without ever losing its focus on more needlessly lofty ambitions.

The film’s relaxed atmosphere makes for a comedy of manners that finds its greatest giddiness in the gradual dogpiling of alibis and revelations of attraction, ensuring that “Misericordia” never becomes entirely predictable even as it remains settled. In some ways, a riff on the framework of Pasolini’s “Teorema,” Guiraudie’s version of a man who sleeps his way through the household is one more interested in finding the comedy between awkward silences than any sort of malleable class commentary. Nonetheless, the lines are there to be read, and “Misericordia” offers a softened text of forbidden attraction to be explored between the fog and the trees.

6. A Family

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Known primarily as an author, Christine Angot’s most significant brush with cinema before 2024 came from co-writing a pair of Claire Denis’s more middling features. Suffice it to say, it was a big leap for the writer to make the jump to the director’s chair, even more so when one account for the revisiting of trauma inherent in the premise of “A Family.” Turning the camera towards herself, Angot takes the opportunity to explore in this film the reverberations of an abusive, incestuous childhood relationship with her father, and the utter lack of support she’d received both at the time and when the realities of her trauma would bleed into her writing.

As Angot revisits some of the frankly disgusting takes on her situation—both within her own family and from the critical sphere examining those elements in her books—“A Family” becomes an increasingly difficult reconciliation, not with the abuser, but with Angot’s own tumultuous feelings towards the entire situation. “A Family” is certainly a stark proposition for a directorial debut, but given its importance to the director, it also wouldn’t be surprising to see this be the first and last film Angot ever decides to make.

Also Read: 20 Best Movie Performances of 2024

5. When Fall Is Coming

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Where would French cinema be in any given year without François Ozon popping his head in to say hello? Much like Guiraudie’s aforementioned “Misericordia,” Ozon’s latest “When Fall Is Coming” takes a decidedly muted approach to the confluence of attraction, murder, and small-town quaintness (plus a discerning interest in mushrooms) to create a distinctly—and fittingly, given its title—autumnal sensation. As is typically the case with the prolific artist, this feature imbues its thriller elements with a dose of quiet, simmering tension, here favoring a neighborly suspicion over Ozon’s usual propensity for elements of camp.

When Fall Is Coming” works primarily because its cozy atmosphere plays effectively against an established family dynamic between a mother and daughter that clearly harbors years of repressed resentment, allowing for the spillover to come about in a natural yet inevitable fashion. How Ozon then goes about reacting to these changes is what makes the film so enticing, as the spawning relationship between Hélène Vincent and Pierre Lottin feeds into a playful yarn nonetheless dyed with a shade of longstanding loneliness and neglect that makes their bond so decided to begin with.

4. Beating Hearts

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“Beating Hearts” appearing as high as it does on this list may come as a shock to those who’ve either seen the film or followed its critical reception, as Gilles Lellouche’s film has been, to put it mildly, rather eviscerated by most who’ve seen it. This reception is, in some ways, understandable, as Lellouche’s sprawling romance between two doomed lovers is both unwieldy and vulgar in its presentation. At the same time, though, the film is a pure adrenaline shot of epic, distinctly French passion that carries itself with great verve across its lofty runtime.

Anchored by the presence of Adèle Exarchopoulos (as most French films tend to be these days), Lellouche finds in his second major directorial effort a decades-spanning sense of longing and rockstar energy in a “Romeo & Juliet”-style narrative that never lets up despite its own waning narrative stamina. A massive, musically infused undertaking that succeeds more often than it fails (despite what a European audience somehow obsessed with “Emilia Pérez” would have you think), “Beating Hearts” starts at 100 and never lets up, as Lellouche peppers the film with distinct imagery and an unapologetic vigor to carry it over the finish line.

3. The Count of Monte Cristo

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Alexandre Dumas’s “The Count of Monte Cristo” has been adapted to the screen so often that it’s easy to lose count (…of Monte Cristo). For the latest iteration—an unabashed French blockbuster with tinges of prestige amidst its massive production value—Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte go all-in on a sweeping, three-hour retelling of the classic revenge tale with just as much sincerity as acknowledgment for the source material’s sillier elements. The end result is an extravagant French film fully committed to (and, to a degree, enamored with) the inanity of its own classic premise.

Delaporte and de La Patellière make no secret that the overarching plot of vengeance that keeps the story running for so long only does so because it’s infused with so much convolution and excessive psychological warfare, and “The Count of Monte Cristo” fully leans into that giddy expression of expensive retribution. Revenge is like an all-consuming poison, and the French directors know that nothing illustrates that self-mutilating sensation more clearly than a ploy so buried in its own complicated detail that it becomes impossible to come up for air. Then again, with a plot this entertaining, who’d want to stop to breathe, anyway?

2. The Balconettes

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Among the relatively younger generation of French actors, Noémie Merlant has quickly become one of the most alluring and compelling—not merely in appearance, but also in her fascinating choice of projects. No greater proof exists than “The Balconettes,” Merlant’s sophomore directorial feature that also casts the actor as one of three women in a stifling Marseille apartment complex, compelled by a sensual neighbor across the street. As things get out of hand after a night of joy and hedonism, the trio find themselves confronted with different forms of latent and active patriarchal opposition that take their journeys to increasingly Almodóvar-like heights.

It’s in this respect that Merlant’s voice as director (and co-writer alongside the hero of French cinema Céline Sciamma) shines through with the most surprising level of commitment to the increasingly nonsensical and lowbrow grasp of comedy and horror that begins to define “The Balconettes.” Through it all, however, remains a consistent tone of sisterly solidarity that plays astonishingly well with the more somber elements of male-led suppression that drive the film, punctuated by levels of camp that seem almost antithetical, but are instead entirely fitting for an atmosphere of kinship; again, those early Almodóvar influences are entirely unavoidable, and entirely welcome.

1. Dahomey

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We’re going to cheat a little bit here, for while Mati Diop’s “Dahomey” is, by most accounts, a very Senegalese film—or, at the very least given its Beninese setting, a distinctly African production—the European elements of funding, technically speaking, make the film a French feature. In any case, as a direct examination of the specter of French colonialism in Africa, “Dahomey” is probably more French in its thematic content than the vast majority of films actually produced there. In her Golden Bear-winning documentary, Diop examines precisely that relationship between France and its one-time colonies to see where the blood stains might possibly begin to wash out (if never entirely) through the repatriation of sacred Dahomeian artifacts.

A film that quite directly brings life to those artifacts stolen from their homeland, “Dahomey” confronts the impacts of colonization by asking to what extent such a process of reclamation could even be effective if it is only undertaken in part? To what extent are such acts of “benevolence” little more than half-hearted attempts to save face? In what way is modern-day Benin’s history shaped by the absence of these treasures, now suddenly (and only partially) returned to their rightful place? Diop doesn’t have all the answers, but she knows which questions to ask—and, more importantly, who (and what) should be asking them.

Related to Best French Movies of 2024: The 30 Best Films of 2024

10 Best French Movies of 2024  (2025)
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