The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The history of French Cinema is the history of the beginnings of cinema – from the very first films made by the Lumiere Brothers, which screened in Paris in 1895, to some of the first science-fiction and fantasy films by Georges Melies who pioneered most of the major special effects techniques.
France has produced a steady stream of films since. Its next major wave of genre output came during the French New Wave of the 1950s and 60s, which produced a series of experimental films that broke with Hollywood narrative and technique, creating a series of surrealistic, sometimes extraordinary, often baffling and pseudo-intellectual works.
France has its steady output of films that are light comedies, popular thrillers and action films, as well as a strong output of drama and independent works that usually defy a Hollywood norm. From the 1980s onwards, one of the major producers of genre cinema has come from Luc Besson who operates in the action, science-fiction and fantasy genres.
The other major intersection with genre material came during the so-called French Extremism movement of the mid-late 2000s involving a series of horror films that pushed gore, sadism and blood-letting to unbearably brutal levels.
Regular genre contributors from France include Alexandra Aja, Olivier Assayas, Enki Bilal, Alexandre Bustillo, Leos Carax, Marc Caro, Helene Cattet, Sylvain Chomet, Rene Clair, Jean Cocteau, Marina de Van, Claire Denis, Julia Ducournau, Quentin Dupieux, Bruno Forzani, Abel Gance, Christophe Gans, Xavier Gens, Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Gondry, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rene Laloux, Pascal Laugier, Louis Malle, Chris Marker, Julien Maury, Georges Melies, Dominik Moll, David Moreau, Gaspar Noe, Michel Ocelot, Francois Ozon, Xavier Palud, Pitof, Thierry Poiraud, Jean-Marie Poire, Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais, Jean Rollin and Roger Vadim.
A French animated film, SF noir set on a future Mars with detectives fighting against someone who is jailbreaking robots. This deploys a strong and confident use of Cyberpunk tropes
Palm Springs was one of the funniest and most delightful variants on the Groundhog Day timeloop theme. This is a French language remake that relocates the story to the Moroccan desert
Controversial remake of the 1980 psycho film. The remake’s unique take is that everything is shot in first-person from the point-of-view of the killer.
Another of Quentin Dupieux’s bizarrely surreal deadpan comedies in which two amiable idiots discover a fly that is about the size of a dog and believe they could tame it
An entry in the spate of early 1980s nuclear war films about the residents of a French village who are sheltered in a wine cellar when the bomb drops and their efforts to survive in the aftermath
Effective and unusual French film in which four prisoners in a jail cell discover an occult tome in the walls and start reading its spells thinking it can offer a means of escape
A French horror film shot all in a single unbroken take as a deadly infection spreads all around town and we follow various people as they try to survive in the midst
A gender-flipped version of the Jekyll and Hyde story with Isabelle Huppert is a teacher who is walked over in every aspect of her life before she is changed by a strange electrical discharge
French thriller where psychiatrist Gerard Depardieu tests a device that allows him to swap bodies with a serial killer – only for the killer to get free and steal his life
Luc Besson makes a preposterously entertaining work where drug mule Scarlett Johansson develops superhuman mental capabilities – sort of if you imagine Limitless reconceived as an action film
Long-winded French film largely about criticising the country’s problematic immigration and asylum seeking system. This also has a B plot about a series of cursed documents
Luc Besson written action-prison film that blatantly borrows from Escape From New York. An entertaining comic-book of a movie, even if its depth exists no further than Guy Pearce tossing off flip one-liners
Another entry from the oeuvre of cult French director Jean Rollin – a film about the bond between a girl and her zombified friend that sits between some gore amateurish effects and a poetic subtlety
On its own terms, a frequently lovely film. The director made a big thing of how much he loved the Saint-Exupery original but makes a completely different story with only occasional Little Prince interludes
Bernardo Bertolucci directs a biopic of the Buddha, which is interspersed with a modern story where a Western boy learns that he is the reincarnation of a revered abbot
Chris Marker, the director of La Jetee, returns to SF. Though this is set around a Virtual Reality game, it is in fact a documentary essay about the Battle of Okinawa
A surreal very Lynchian French film in which a deranged Charlotte Rampling shoots herself and then afterwards appears to possess Laurent Lucas’s wife Charlotte Gainsbourg
An extraordinary work from the French New Wave filled with incredible visuals as lovers drift through an ornate hotel where memory and time itself seems to shift
French film about Earth endangered by an oncoming moon and how only one man can save the world. This seemed it might be something culty – before the mind-bogglingly bizarre science becomes apparent
French director Robert Bresson’s take on the Arthurian legends, stripped of nobility and magic. I’m not part of the critical cult around Bresson. Films that are dull and lifeless are not about spiritual yearning just dull
Michel Ocelot returns to make a sequel to Kirikou and the Sorceress. This expands the quality of animation and is slightly the lesser than its predecessor but not without its charms
The debut film from French animator Michel Ocelot, a beautifully simple series of African folk tales about a young boy whose plain-speaking truths outwit a witch
The third of Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou films, delightful tales about the ingenuity and plain-speaking wisdom of a young boy winning out over adult pomposity and foolishness. Animated with a simplicity that is magical
A classic French animated film that remained unseen for over thirty years. A fairytale about a cruel king and two lovers aided by a mockingbird, it emerges with an impressively epic sweep
Directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury made the brutally extreme Inside. Here they return with what feels like an unofficial copy of Candyman about a vengeful boogeywoman
An early film written/produced by Luc Besson concerning a scientist driven crazy by tv announcers who invents a device that can kill people as they appear live on tv
The US remake of the French time travel comedy Les Visiteurs. With a script by John Hughes, this imports the original film’s stars but misses its comedy charms by a mile
Chris Marker’s celebrated 28 minute time paradox film, an experimental work that was made at the height of the French New Wave. This later became the basis of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys
French New Wave SF film from director Alain Resnais about a time machine. The idea of a protagonist travelling at random through his own memory is predictive of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
A French animated film where a boy with a cuckoo-clock for a heart goes on a quest for love through a surreal quasi-Steampunk world. With cameos from Georges Melies and Jack the Ripper
Extraordinary filmmaking from Abel Gance made at the height of the silent era. Gance was deeply affected by World War I and makes an epic anti-war parable that stuns you with its cinematic craft
A highly controversial Gaspar Noe film that is all told in reverse chronological order, depicting the rape of Monica Bellucci and violent revenge by her husband Vincent Cassel
The most difficult to watch of the films to come out of French Extremism about a pregnant woman pursued by a mystery woman determined to tear the baby from her womb
A French film that ratchets up quite a reasonable degree of scary tension in taking a kitchen sink view as spiders overrun a low-income Paris apartment building
Another of Quentin Dupieux’s gonzo, surreal comedies where a married couple buy a house and find it has a portal that takes them twelve hours into the future, while making them younger
From an early script by S. Craig Zahler, this is an incredibly brutal and harrowing work about a group of cooks trapped inside an asylum for the criminally insane during a power cut
Fascinatingly perverse film directed and written by its star French actress Marina de Van who plays a woman who becomes obsessed with mutilating her own skin
Georges Melies’ successor to A Trip to the Moon featuring a journey to the sun by astronauts aboard a combination train-submarine-dirigible. A charming whimsy with remarkably technically accomplished effects for the era
Comic-book creator Enki Bilal creates a visually extraordinary film about Ancient Egyptian gods awakening in a future New York
One of the key films from cult director Walerian Borowczyk, a quartet of exquisitely photographed and art directed erotic tales, including one about Countess Bathory
A modernised retelling of the Cinderella story that is set in the Paris fashion world starring with Jennifer Grey as a lowly seamstress falling for self-important fashion designer Rob Lowe
Claire Denis makes a film loosely based on the activities of a true-life drag performer/serial killer. However, she seems uninterested in developing plot or suspense
Largely overlooked, this is the first version of the story in colour and has a lavishness that the previous versions lacked. On the minus side, Anthony Quinn’s Quasimodo is no more than a simpleton lacking in pathos
The title suggests either a comedic take on the superhero film or a teen film about a kid discovering superpowers. The least thing you expect this to be is a French police thriller about a unit investigating super-powered crimes
Group of backpackers at a chateau find an old VCR that mashes up genres and sucks them inside. There’s a good idea for a horror film somewhere here but it ends up with terrible execution
This could be The Raid reconceived as a zombie film (and a few borrowings from Assault on Precinct 13). This never reinvents the basics, just delivers a ferociously entertaining, bared to the bone zombie survival film
Genuinely mind-screwing effort from Leos Carax. Imagine a version of Cosmopolis as hijacked by Alejandro Jodorowsky – a series of surreal vignettes that arrives at a major “huh?” ending
Disappointing film adaptation of the videogame from Xavier Gens that comes with unremarkable action scenes, a script filled with holes and Timothy Olyphant miscast as Agent 47
The film that made the world take notice of Alexandre Aja. Aja serves up a brutal and gore-drenched variant on the Backwoods Brutality film, although things fall apart in an absurd twist ending
The title suggests a film about stoners more than about a space mission. From acclaimed director Claire Denis, this is less the space realism of Gravity and more akin to Solaris and its mission crew falling apart
A French film about a teenager who buys a demonic cellphone and is able to use it to enact comeuppances against the people in his life. A 976-Evil for the cellular era
French thriller about police investigating a killer who is infecting victims with the bubonic plague and leaving Mediaeval clues, all part of an elaborate revenge scheme
The third film and least version of the classic horror story about a pianist who receives hands transplanted from a murderer and is driven mad believing they are possessing him
A controversy-laden Jean-Luc Godard film that offers an irreverent modern-day retelling of the Immaculate Conception. An amusing idea that vanishes under Godard’s pretensions
From the director of Emmanuelle, this is an adaptation of an adult comic-book that replays the lost city adventure with the addition of a mind-boggling softcore fetishism
Zombies and soccer! Ok? From co-director of the ferocious French zombie film The Horde, a rather entertaining effort that resembles something of Shaun of the Dead in its comedy approach
Pascal Laugier emerged as a most promising director with Martyrs. All of his films hang on improbably contrived twists. This starts out as a home invasion film not unakin to The Strangers but nothing is as it seems
An entry in a popular series of French slapstick comedies with Louis de Funes as a comic gendarme. In this, the series sole genre entry, he goes up against alien visitors
The final film of French animator Rene Laloux, a planetary adventure set on a world where Laloux delights in creating exotically trippy aliens and landscapes. Released in English as Light Years with an Isaac Asimov script
Gore-drenched French-Canadian film where teens play a board game that forces them to kill a select number of people lest their heads explode
Xavier Gens delivers a French copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is largely by the numbers excepting for a gore level raised to what must be a maximum for the genre
One of the early films of French director Jean Rollin who gained a cult following for his vampire films that offer a near-plotless blend of artily surreal imagery and erotica
One Cut of the Dead was one of the freshest takes on the overworked zombie film in recent years. Here Academy Award-winning director Michel Hazanavicius conducts a French remake but misses the mark
A big-budget space opera from Luc Besson. This offers a dazzlingly designed future but the plot is an inane hodgepodge of bad SF elements with a tone that flails between action and camp
Brian De Palma makes a return to the classic psycho-thrillers where he made his name, shouting virtuoso directorial flourish from the rafters and pulling off an amazingly contrived plot
A visually striking compilation of five animated French horror tales. Each varies widely in style but the result is far more extraordinary than many live-action counterparts
A film that received great acclaim at awards season. Anthony Hopkins is a dementia-ridden senior and we experience his state of mind subjectively in a constantly shifting sense of what is real
One of the films from cult French director Jean Rollin whose works always contained an arty mix of horror and erotica. This concerns mysterious blood-drinking rituals among a group of women at a chateau
The first film from French animator Rene Laloux, a trippily surreal vision and one of the few portraits of a genuinely alien world on film
Early silent adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story that treats the story liberally, drops Poe’s mood of desolation and despair for one more of melancholy, but holds an undeniable style
Cult exploitation director Jesus Franco pays homage to the mad surgeon films of his heyday. Essentially one of Franco’s Dr Orloff films by way of the sadistic despatches of the giallo film
Classic French thriller about a mad surgeon who abducts women to graft their faces onto his disfigured daughter. The film has a rare visual poetry combined with moments of horror that are still effective decades later
French documentary made for the 150th celebration of Georges Melies’s birthday. Interesting if never uncovering anything new. Too much focus is placed on A Trip to the Moon and its recent restoration
Luc Besson adapts a French comic-book – sort of a female version of Tintin – with uneven but generally amiable regard. The result is somewhere between an Indiana Jones adventure and the quirkness of an Amelie
Entirely charming French animated film from the directors of A Town Called Panic. This is a children’s film that comes with a beautiful simplicity, a duo of winning characters and some side-splitting visual gags
Gaspar Noe’s hallucinatory Day-Glo vision of a soul’s departure into the afterlife all shot in first-person perspective. This could be a 2001: A Space Odyssey for the trance culture generation
Full-length film made by the French electronic music duo Daft Punk based around the robot guises the band adopts. Resembles an extended student film and feels exactly like an SF version of The Brown Bunny
Cryptic and baffling French art science-fiction film involving strange happenings at a laboratory where we never get any explanations about what is going on
Head-scratchingly odd fantasy film produced by John Boorman and family where a young boy is transported to a world where he mingles with characters from fiction
Almost certainly this is the one Christopher Lee Dracula film you will never have heard about. This was a French comedy made not long after Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, spoofing the Dracula film
Luc Besson makes a return with an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The surprise about this is that he fairly much uncreditedly remakes Francis Ford Coppola’s version of the story
French film about true-life serial killer Marcel Petiot, a respectable doctor who operated a lifeline for Jewish refugees during WWII only to kill them
French actress-director Marina de Van makes a film about a woman who finds her identity being occluded by someone else’s life. de Van creates a superbly paranoid sense of dis-ease that compares favourably to Polanski’s The Tenant
A film that was the cause of much censorship controversy when it came out where two teenage girls decide to become devil worshippers and engage on a spree of cruel and malicious acts
Eccentric French fairytale filled with appealingly absurdist and surreal touches and with visuals that remind of the extravagance of a Barbarella. Charming and visually engaging
Animated film spun off from a popular French online gameworld, which had also previously spawned an animated tv series. The results are amiably engaging with a sense of humour that makes the show
Retelling of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from cult Euro erotica director Walerian Borowczyk. Not quite the erotic retelling one expects, this nevertheless conducts some radical revisions
An Academy Award winning film from the great iconoclast Luis Buñuel, a series of surreal vignettes as a group of friends set out to dinner but always end up being prevented in strange ways
Michel Ocelot is one of the great underrated animators of the world. Here he makes an exquisite tribute to the Belle Epoque featuring appearances from names of the era and decked out in Steampunk inventions
Classic French psycho-thriller that is gripping in its psychological games before reaching an unforgettable twist ending. It has been twice remade and its plot much imitated by others but never bettered
An early film from Jess Franco in which an exotic dancer is turned into a mind-controlled assassin who lures and kills victims with her six-inch long fingernails as part of a revenge scheme
An early Georges Melies whimsy only a few minutes long in which The Devil appears and causes mischief
Beautifully pure-hearted French Wartime allegory set during the Middle Ages about The Devil who has sent out envoys to tempt mortals into damnation via affairs of the heart
Luc Besson made his directorial debut with this remarkable film. At a time when everybody was making copies of Mad Max 2, Besson demonstrates a poetry in depicting a post-apocalyptic world where people have lost the ability to speak
Corporate thriller in which Connie Nielsen discovers an underground of snuff S&M. This develops a compulsive hold but its pullback to kneejerk moralism is dissatisfying
In their debut, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro make an hilariously eccentric and unclassifiable film about the inhabitants of a strange apartment building
Another of the strange surreal deadpan films from Quentin Dupieux about a man who buys a deerskin jacket that then speaks and urges him to eliminate everybody else who is wearing a jacket
Stylish French slasher film about actors being stalked as they put on a performance of Little Red Riding Hood at a country estate. The fairytale is adeptly wound in and out as metaphor.
From Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, an incredibly spooky film, almost all of which is shot underwater, about two divers discovering a haunted house at the bottom of a lake
From the director of the standout Meander, a dark and claustrophobic film set in the 1950s about miners disturbing a Lovecraftian entity buried in the depths of a mineshaft