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.
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
Xavier Gens makes an undeniably entertaining big-budget film about killer shark amok in the Seine
In the vein of Pasolini’s Teorema, French director Bruno Dumont makes a film about an ambiguous visitor who may be capable of miracles. Slow, very opaque but eventually rewarding
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
Gentle affecting film about a boy learning Buddhist life lessons as he journeys across Mongolia with an old man
One of the films from cult director Jean Rollin. This is a zombie film, clearly influenced by Night of the Living Dead, but with a uniquely French spin – the zombies are caused by drinking toxic wine
French film about a tv gameshow where contestants are pursued by armed hunters. Much of this was copied by the subsequent The Running Man but this conducted the idea first and better
Alain Resnais meta-fiction with John Gielgud as an aging writer sits in bed writing a story that is based on the people around him
Roman Polanski makes a return to Rosemary’s Baby territory in this work with Johnny Depp as a rare book collector on the trail of an occult tome. Polanski great a great sense of sinister forces surrounding Depp but the film reaches an unsatisfying ending
The zombie genre has become creatively overused and exhausted in recent years but this French entry plays with an appealing originality, sort of like a low-key version of Dawn of the Dead where a man builds a Parisian apartment building into his own paradise
The second in the works of arty vampire erotica that gained French director Jean Rollin a cult following. The surreal visuals and in particular the costuming make for mind-boggling visuals
A documentary devoted to the life and films of stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen whose films, which include the Sinbad films and Jason and the Argonauts, have gained a cult following
A film from Quentin Dupieux that comes in a series of quirky intersecting stories where the dreams and films different characters are watching/making keeping blurring together in mind-boggling ways
A charming French-made animated film about a genteel singing monster. Nothing profound but this is beautifully animated and sweetly appealing in all the right places
Fine film that deserves wider recognition with Jeff Goldblum as a man in an asylum who claims to be The Devil
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
The fourth of the works of arty vampire erotica from cult director Jean Rollin. Rollin has discovered more in the way of plot by this point, while the film has a beautifully dreamy fairytale-like quality
A documentary focused on the unique and distinctive French director Michel Gondry, tracing his emergence through music video and to the success of films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Another of Quentin Dupieux’s hilariously gonzo comedies made up a series of deadpan surreal vignettes, including a witty parody of the modern superhero film
French animated film that is about as far from children’s entertainment as it is possible to get – a mordantly dark comedy that operates in similar territory to The Addams Family in its tale of a family that operates a shop selling items of despatch to the suicidally minded
Not the classic Irwin Allen bad movie but a work of disturbed psychology about a woman who develops an unhealthy obsession with feeding locusts blood and turning them into a killer swarm
Trilogy of Edgar Allan Poe tales from three European directors. Roger Vadim’s opening episode drags but both Louis Malle and Federico Fellini deliver standout works in their respective segments
Jean Renoir is considered one of the greatest of all film directors – this is his only venture into genre material, a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Though Renoir seems disinterested in making a horror film, he offers up the most faithful interpretation of the story on screen to date
A horror anthology featuring episodes from seven different directors. As with other anthologies, the episodes vary in quality, ranging between the so-so, the mostly quite good and one standout segment
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.
French horror film that generates a reasonable level of tension as a couple are attacked in their home by mysterious strangers
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
A harsh and urgent French-made catastrophe film about a family trying to survive and get to safety with the appearance of a sudden cloud of deadly acid rain
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
Famous surrealist short film made as a collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, full of the shock juxtapositions and symbolism you associate with either
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
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
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
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
This starts out seeming like a Backroads Brutality film with an innocent family being attacked after taking a side road detour, only to end in increasingly stranger supernatural territory
A strong well-made French thriller that comes with the influence of Se7en involving murders on a mountainside glacier and a secretive boarding school with ties back to the Nazi era
An experimental silent film from the great Rene Clair that depicts a group of people who remain unaffected as all of Paris around them has been frozen in time by a ray experiment
Actress Julie Delpy directs/stars in an adaptation of the Countess Bathory story. In trying to pitch itself as a work of historical feminism and having sympathy for Bathory, this downplays the considerable horror element of the story
Colourful and frothy whimsy from Fina Torres in the Magical Realist tradition about a woman engaged in a series of romantic mishaps in Paris
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
Catherine Breillat, a director known for her full-on explorations of sexuality, takes on an adaptation of the French fairytale about a multiple wife murderer
French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet of The City of Lost Children and Amelie fame returns with an appealingly eccentric, beautifully designed comedic take on the machine revolution
Another of the films from cult exploitation director Jess Franco. This is a vampire film made with a mix of arty erotica with Lina Romay as Countess Irina Karlstein who drains men and women’s lifeforce during sex
Sequel to the French action hit. The plot shuffles the same basic elements around but it is the action we have come for, which is slow to start but soon kicks into exhilarating high gear
A wildly deranged and gore-drenched ride. Imagine Rosemary’s Baby with an Alien chesburster where a woman is impregnated by a parasite that maintains a monologue as it urges her to kill and drink blood to feed it.
Next to Hayao Miyazaki, Michel Ocelot is the greatest animators of all time but one of the least widely recognised. Here he conducts a beautifully made Arabian fairytale
The third of the live-action Asterix films starring Gerard Depardieu as Obelix. This faithfully replicates the look and visuals of the original comic-books as the two head off to the Olympics
The first of the live-action films based on the famous comic-books set during the Roman period, starring Gerard Depardieu who seems born to play the part of Obelix
The second of the live-action Asterix films starring Gerard Depardieu, this is a visual delight that gets the comic-book’s nonsensical visuals down perfectly
Fourth of the live-action films adapted from the Asterix comic-books with Gerard Depardieu as Obelix. This replicates the absurdist historical wit of the originals while poking fun at the foibles of the British
Luc Besson makes a charming and funny film where a suicidal loser is aided by a tall and statuesque Rie Rasmussen who claims to be an angel sent to help him sort his life out
Surrealistic cinematic joke from French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard that mashes up film noir and SF where hard-boiled detective travels to another planet represented by contemporary Paris
This collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali is not much more than a plotless series of surrealistic images, which are frequently calculated to outrage
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
In her first English-language debut, French director/writer/actress Marina de Van delivers a variant on Carrie, albeit rewritten as a tale about child abuse. Oblique, quiet but undeniably effective when de Van pulls her punches
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
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
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
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
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
Influenced by the classic Eyes Without a Face, this is a work of French Gothic about an aristocrat trying to find the right woman to use her face for his disfigured wife
Olivier Assayas’s high-profile but wildly critically divided work feels as though it has several competing plots circling around Kristen Stewart – a ghost story, one about a mystery texter and briefly a murder mystery – which feel incomplete and unfinished and only maybe intersecting with one another
Luc Besson produced film set among drum and bass dance culture in New York that follows an aspiring mute dancer (Mia Frye) who is asked to test a new technology that translates dance to music
French animated film about a group of kids with psychic powers going amok. Is okay at what it does but had much of its thunder stolen by the more recent and more spectacular Chronicle
A monster movie where the major distinction is that the monster is drawn from Ancient Egyptian mythology and the locale is an unearthed pyramid. The film is too conceptually slim to do much with such an interesting background but it does deliver some solid jumps
A French-Spanish film in which a group of troubled youths escaped from a reform centre only to discover that all the adults around them have become zombies
French film that was nominated for the 2011 Best Animated Film at the Oscars. Cute but over-rated, the film is all highly stylised hand-drawn caricature that looks great but never works very hard to engage in terms of its characters
French Backwoods Brutality film heads in some admirably weird and gross directions but falls apart at the end
A French police procedural where detectives are plunged into a series of bizarre murders involving a child sacrifice cult and a folk boogeyman. From the directorial duo who started the whole French Extremism movement with Inside
Roger Vadim conducts a very sofctore adaptation the classic vampire story Carmilla but this seems pallid and bloodless in contrast to the Hammer Films of the same period, not to mention their later adaptations of the same story
Early film from Jean Cocteau that consists of a progression of surreal situations. Dreamy and occasionally interesting
From an Alexandre Aja associate, a reasonably tight thriller about a woman taking shelter in a gas station from a psycho sniper outside
This was critically dismissed – even its director spoke out against it – nevertheless it proves a flawed but not entirely uninteresting French Cyberpunk film as mercenary Vin Diesel is hired to protect miracle girl Melane Thierry
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
Costa-Gavras, a director known for highly political films, makes a dark comedy about an unemployed man who sets out to eliminate his rival job applicants
The second in a duo of live-action French-language adaptations of Herge’s famous comic-book character, which gets the resemblance to the characters almost perfect
Animated adaptation of the Tintin character that gets the look and details of the characters just right but is ruined by bad dubbing of some of the voice parts and allowing a slapstick element to take over
One of several animated films based on the popular comic-book characters Asterix and Obelix made by Dargaud Films
No relation to the disastrous Chevy Chase film, a French romantic comedy that has modernised retellings of various fairytales wound into the plot, often being deflated or turned on their head
Lightweight Luc Besson directed children’s fantasy with a young boy shrunken down to miniature size to engage in a series of CGI animated adventures among a race of fairy-like people. Several sequels followed
This English-language debut from Emir Kusturica should have been a hit going by its cast that includes a young Johnny Depp romancing a 50+ Faye Dunaway, but is a plotless piece of improv of occasional surreal interludes
Comic-book creator Enki Bilal creates a visually extraordinary film about Ancient Egyptian gods awakening in a future New York
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
More of an abstract art short than a film. Dialogueless, almost plotless, this concerns the lone human in a city inhabited by inscrutable beings that amuse themselves by rearranging matter
An early Georges Melies whimsy only a few minutes long in which The Devil appears and causes mischief
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
Louis Malle’s one and only venture into the French New Wave – a baffling work set around social collapse as a young girl wanders a farmhouse encountering unicorns, talking animals and various surreal happenings
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
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
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
A very nicely animated French Steampunk film about an expedition aboard a steam airship to explore the secret entrance to an underground world in the Antarctic. A computer animated film all made by one person.
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
Very strange French SF film about a futuristic truck race
A French variant on The Quiet Earth adapted from a comic-book about a group of young people who wake up to find themselves alone in a deserted city