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.
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
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
Jean Cocteau makes one of the greatest of all fantasy films and the finest of all fairytale adaptations, elaborating the original story out with a visual magic that still manages to dazzle audiences today
A standout French-made stalker film that leaves Fatal Attraction in its dust. Isabelle Carré giving a frightening performance as a woman who becomes obsessed with a doctor
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
Splendidly nasty French film that feels like Thelma and Louise by way of Natural Born Killers where two women pick up guns and go on a shooting spree against men who are abusive jerks. Directed by two women and cast with porn actresses, this holds little back
In their debut, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro make an hilariously eccentric and unclassifiable film about the inhabitants of a strange apartment building
Jean Cocteau’s beautiful modernisation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice updated to post-War France
Charmingly capricious and silly adaptation of the comic-strip with a wide-eyed Jane Fonda as the spacegoing heroine. Filled with some wonderfully naughty gags and a production and costume design scheme that goes to a gorgeously deranged excess
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
An exquisitely dreamlike erotic fairytale from cult director Walerian Borowczyk, a variant on Beauty and the Beast involving the liaison between a girl and a beast.
Delightful and completely charming Rene Clair comedy about a daydreamer. A much better version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty than either of the official film adaptations
Adaptation of the fairytale that takes place in an exquisitely dreamy sumptuousness – a stunningly designed, costumed and photographed world that has a genuine magic. However, the motion-capture animated Beast looks far too much like a CGI effect
Jean Cocteau’s follow-up to his earlier Orpheus becomes an opportunity where Cocteau makes an autobiographical films, revisiting his own life and works
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
Anarchic French film entirely without dialogue as a group of people in an apartment begin to revert to pre-civilised behaviour
Pascal Laugier makes one of the most horrific films to emerge from France in the 00s. Scenes of grim torture sit alongside a plot that messes with almost everything we take for granted
The second film from Leos Carax, a near-future set romance that bursts with freshness and originality
Beautifully shot directorial debut from Jean-Jacques Annaud that sets out to dispel all the cinematic cliches about cavemen and dinosaurs and offers up an anthropologically realistic prehistoric film
Melies Cinemagician is a special screening of a selection of films from Georges Melies presented by Vancouver’s Vancity Theater to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The show was a live performance involving a score composed especially for the event, displays of conjuring tricks and a magic lantern show. The same year also saw […]
An amazing reinterpretation of the classical fairytale as modern ballet for adults. This does amazing things to reinvent the original and is visually extraordinary
A documentary that offers the best discussion of the life of Georges Melies to date. Much of the film is focused on the recent rediscovery of a complete trove of negatives of Melies’s film
A Michel Gondry film that blurs the line between dream and reality with hilariously offbeat regard. Gondry indulges his eccentricities to the maximum with quite sublime results
The best killer car tire film ever – a monster movie spoof wound in so many layers of meta-fiction that it is positively side-splitting. The smartest and funniest monster movie in ages
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
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
After the disastrous misstep of The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry returns to the surreal whimsy of The Science of Sleep. A film where Gondry delights in scene after scene of visual nonsense and serving up all the appealingly capricious silliness he can muster – creativity for creativity’s sake alone
One of Roman Polanski’s least recognised films in which he both directs and plays the lead as a mousy man driven to a state of paranoia and the point he loses his identity by the neighbours in a Parisian apartment building
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
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
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
An extraordinary French film that has nothing at all to do with flesh-eating zombies but delves into voodoo religion that expands out to makes contrasts with French colonialism with striking results
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
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
From Kirikou director Michel Ocelot, an anthology of animated fairytales that prove quite delightful
An exquisitely directed homage to giallo cinema – a fascinating work that has been stripped of almost all dialogue that takes place on a purely visual level of sensation and body movement
Obscure film in which director Fernando Arrabal depicts a series of vignettes from his childhood depicting the sadism and cruelty of the Spanish Fascists
Agnieszka Holland drama about the sudden return of a boy who went missing several years earlier, although may well be an impostor. Contains minor fantasy elements
As a follow-up to Holy Motors, Leos Carax returns with of all things a musical. As might be expected of Carax, this is a wildly surrealistic film, not the least of which is one of the characters is a singing puppet
Animated film that takes place in a Steampunk alternate history. This brims over with an extraordinary degree of visual invention from the amazingly detailed vistas of the world to a script tossing in quirky twists and wacky inventions
Hilarious French comedy where a filthy Mediaeval knight and his servant are transported into the present-day
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
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
A film based on the real-life figure of Francois Vidocq, who became the world’s first detective, which the film uses as the stepping off point to create an exquisite dark fantasy
It was a box-office bomb but this is one of the most breathtaking and completely designed SF work to ever cross the screen. In terms of effects, sets and costuming, Luc Besson gives us a work that is an overwhelming treat for the eyes
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
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
Splendidly original and completely off the wall work of stylised animation from Sylvain Chomet
Orson Welles’s adaptation of the Frank Kafka novel about a man caught in a nightmare bureaucracy is one of the most visually stunning black-and-white films ever shot
The first and best film version of a classic story about an expedition finding the city ruled by an immortal queen in the desert. This was shot in the real locations and comes with a stunning sense of expansiveness
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
Julia Ducournau’s Cannes award-winning film is a challenging work that pushes boundaries into uncomfortable places. Not to mention comes with human and car sex scenes
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
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.
Famous short film adaptation of an Ambrose Bierce short story that patented the twist ending in which someone discovers that have been dead all along
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
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
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
This may be the most claustrophobic film ever made about a woman trapped inside a labyrinth of narrow tunnels and crawlspaces that house a series of death traps
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
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
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 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
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
Quietly understated French SF film set in a future where all illness has been abolished and a woman becomes a media sensation when she is diagnosed with a terminal condition
The first film in 24 years from Alejandro Jodorowsky, a surreal journey through his own childhood. Gone is Jodorowsky, the mad prophet of El Topo, replaced by a warm, wryly self-reflexive Jodorowsky looking back in on his own life
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
An award-winning and highly acclaimed French film set in a world that is affected by a series of mutations where people are transforming into animal hybrids
Starkly effective Georgian-made film about a young man in need of money being drawn into an underground gambling ring that bets on games of Russian Roulette
Rene Laloux, the animator who made Fantastic Planet, collaborates with cult fantasy artist Moebius and the result is a planetary adventure filled with trippily exotic backgrounds and creatures
Imprisonment thriller where Melanie Laurent wakes up trapped inside a cryogenic capsule, this expands out to become an excellent SF film
Pascal Laugier returns with this fascinating effort about a small town subject to child abductions by a possible boogieman. A film that is as blatantly manipulative as it is ingenious in its way-out twists and turns where everything we assume is going on at the outset is eventually turned completely on its head
Often misidentified as the first science-fiction film, Georges Melies’s short is a whimsy involving comedic exploits on the Lunar surface. Hardly serious as SF but an undeniably iconic work made with enormous sophistication for the day
The best among the films made from the Asterix comics. This delivers the characters and the visual humour the way they should be, plus leaves the sly satiric wit of the originals intact with side-splitting results
Not to be confused with Tommy Wiseau’s bad movie classic. This comes from Christian Volckman who made an impressive debut a few years ago with the animated Cyberpunk film Renaissance. Moving to live-action, this creates an air of unspeakable dread as a couple buy a house that has a hidden room that can manifest anything they wish for
A French zombie film that is about as far removed from a zombie film as it possible to get – the dead inexplicably return to life not to eat the flesh of the living but calm and detached where society’s problem is how to let them return to their previous lives
Dazzling French animated Cyberpunk film shot in the performance capture animated process and then rendered in striking two-tone black-and-white
Luc Besson written/produced film that is a French rehash of Escape from New York but director Pierre Morel gives it a series of exhilarating action and parkour sequences
The almost indescribable second film from Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Delicatessen fame, a Dicekensian street urchin fantasy that takes place in a stunningly designed almost-familiar world filled with eccentric characters
Very nicely made French animated film based around the daughter of the pharaoh Akhenaton
Undeniably shocking French film about a vegetarian girl who is required to eat raw animal meat during a university hazing ritual and thereafter becomes obsessed with eating human flesh
French psycho-thriller where Sergi Lopez gives an unnervingly charming performance as a psychopathic schoolfriend who inserts himself into Laurent Lucas’s life
An early film from Francois Ozon, this offers a modernisation of Hansel and Gretel where the two are teenage lovers on the run before the story turns into a remarkable gay coming out parable
Gerard Depardieu is being interrogated by police inspector Roman Polanski over a murder he cannot remember. Solid, well constructed drama that is turned on its head with a surprise ending
Adaptation of a classic Aleksei Tolstoy story set in Eastern Europe as a family awaits the return of the patriarch who has been turned into a vampire
Beautifully filmed work featuring John Malkovich as an enigmatic Messenger of Death. A coolly sophisticated and mysterious film that plays out like an arthouse version of Final Destination by way of the Jeff Bridges Fearless
Quentin Dupieux’s follow-up to the hilariously culty Rubber, an absurdist film about a man setting out to find his missing dog. You keep expecting something as mind-bendingly hilarious as Rubber but this is more of a mild amusement in the David Lynch-ian deadpan surrealist vein
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
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
Directors Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon Ho make an anthology of strange and surreal tales that take place in Tokyo
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
A French film about a time traveller come to prevent the catastrophic explosion of a nuclear power plant. A low expectation film that turns out to be a comedy that sparkles with wit and inventivity
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
Acclaimed director Claire Denis makes a quite out there film in which people are obsessively driven to devour others during the act of sex
A likeable and colourful French animated film
The peculiar story of a man who gains super-strength and various other powers whenever he is in water, this essentially plays out as a superhero film but in a more low key way without any costumes. Quirky, charming and rather likeably appealing