The Best French Films of All Time

From Méliès to the New Wave to today's Palme winners: French cinema ranked by our composite score across the world's canons.

The Wages of Fear (1953) leads with a composite score of 8.02.

1
The Wages of Fear1953 · Henri-Georges Clouzot
8.02
Palme d'Or winner 1953 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1955 · Berlin Golden Bear winner 1953
2
The Pianist2002 · Roman Polanski
7.15
Palme d'Or winner 2002 · BAFTA Best Film winner 2003 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2003 #1
3
The Piano1993 · Jane Campion
6.71
Palme d'Or winner 1993 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1994 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1993
4
Forbidden Games1952 · René Clément
5.29
BAFTA Best Film winner 1954 · Venice Golden Lion winner 1952 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1953 #1
5
La Dolce Vita1960 · Federico Fellini
5.21
Palme d'Or winner 1960 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1960 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #35
6
Amour2012 · Michael Haneke
4.90
Palme d'Or winner 2012 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2013 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2012
7
Anatomy of a Fall2023 · Justine Triet
4.88
Palme d'Or winner 2023 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2023 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2023 #3
8
Paris, Texas1984 · Wim Wenders
4.79
Palme d'Or winner 1984 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #185 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1985 #6
9
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1975 · Chantal Akerman
4.65
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #4 · Letterboxd Top 250 #210
10
The Last Emperor1987 · Bernardo Bertolucci
4.55
Oscar Best Picture winner 1987 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1988 #1 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1987 #5
11
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives2010 · Apichatpong Weerasethakul
4.39
Palme d'Or winner 2010 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2010 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #196
12
Justice Is Done1950 · André Cayatte
4.33
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1951 · Venice Golden Lion winner 1950 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1954 #7
13
The Long Absence1961 · Henri Colpi
4.18
Palme d'Or winner 1961 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1964 #1 · Kurosawa's 100 favorite films
14
The Tin Drum1979 · Volker Schlöndorff
4.16
Palme d'Or winner 1979 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1981 #1 · Criterion Collection spine #234
15
I, Daniel Blake2016 · Ken Loach
4.16
Palme d'Or winner 2016 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2017 #1 · Criterion Collection spine #906
16
The Mission1986 · Roland Joffé
4.12
Palme d'Or winner 1986 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1986 · Vatican film list
17
Triangle of Sadness2022 · Ruben Östlund
4.06
Palme d'Or winner 2022 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2022 · Criterion Collection spine #1178
18
Under the Sun of Satan1987 · Maurice Pialat
4.00
Palme d'Or winner 1987 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1987 #1
19
The Leopard1963 · Luchino Visconti
3.97
Palme d'Or winner 1963 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #90 · Vatican film list
20
Underground1995 · Emir Kusturica
3.71
Palme d'Or winner 1995 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1996 #3 · Letterboxd Top 250 #134
21
Last Year at Marienbad1961 · Alain Resnais
3.69
Venice Golden Lion winner 1961 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1964 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #169
22
Eternity and a Day1998 · Thodoros Angelopoulos
3.68
Palme d'Or winner 1998 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1999 #4 · Letterboxd Top 250 #68
23
8½1963 · Federico Fellini
3.67
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #6 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1965 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #31
24
Blue Is the Warmest Colour2013 · Abdellatif Kechiche
3.66
Palme d'Or winner 2013 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2013 #3 · Criterion Collection spine #695
25
The Son's Room2001 · Nanni Moretti
3.60
Palme d'Or winner 2001 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2001 #9 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2002 #9
26
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg1964 · Jacques Demy
3.59
Palme d'Or winner 1964 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #122 · Criterion Collection spine #716
27
A Man and a Woman1966 · Claude Lelouch
3.55
Palme d'Or winner 1966 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1966 #5 · Criterion Collection spine #1304
28
La Notte1961 · Michelangelo Antonioni
3.53
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1961 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #52 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1961 #7
29
Black Orpheus1959 · Marcel Camus
3.52
Palme d'Or winner 1959 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1960 #6 · Criterion Collection spine #48
30
In the Mood for Love2000 · Wong Kar-wai
3.47
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #5 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #9 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2001 #2

The other founding cinema

France has a plausible claim to having invented the movies twice: once in 1895, when the Lumière brothers held the first paid public screening, and again in 1902, when Georges Méliès — a magician who saw the Lumières' machine and immediately understood it was a trick box — made A Trip to the Moon and gave cinema fantasy, effects and narrative showmanship. From that origin, French film history runs as a continuous argument between realism and artifice: Renoir's humanist camera against Méliès' painted moons, the New Wave's street shooting against the "cinema of quality" it overthrew.

Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) is the keystone. Booed at its premiere, cut, banned by the Vichy government as demoralizing, its negative destroyed in an Allied bombing raid — then reconstructed in the 1950s and elevated by critics until it spent half a century in the top five of the Sight & Sound poll. No film better demonstrates that canonical standing is made over time by institutions, restorations and polls, which is precisely what a composite score measures. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), shot in France with a French cast, belongs to the same tier: silent cinema's most intense achievement, nearly lost to fire, rediscovered — famously — in the closet of a Norwegian mental institution in 1981.

The New Wave and its long afterlife

The 1958–1968 explosion gets its own page on this site, but its gravitational pull on this list is unmissable: Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Godard's Breathless, Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 and Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg remade world cinema's idea of what a film could cost, look like and be about. The tradition they founded — director-driven, festival-launched, state-supported through the CNC's avance sur recettes system — is why France has remained the world's most reliable producer of canonical cinema per capita: Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour topping Cahiers' 1959 list, Haneke's Paris-set Amour taking the 2012 Palme, Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) entering the Sight & Sound top 30 at its first eligible poll, and Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall (2023) winning the Palme and cracking the Oscars' top categories. The pipeline from Méliès to Triet has never actually broken — this page is its measurement.