Chargement… 🎬
Still riding the high of your last Wes Anderson marathon, or just finished doomscrolling Netflix for the third night in a row? Here are a few ideas to help you find French movies and directors you’ll love as much as the English-language ones on your watchlist right now.
French films like the English-language ones you love
French movies like Wes Anderson: La Science des rêves and Microbe et Gasoil
Wes Anderson’s meticulously off-kilter worlds have a French cousin in Michel Gondry: La Science des rêves builds its dreams out of cardboard, static, and pure homemade imagination, while Microbe et Gasoil channels the same DIY, dollhouse charm into a scrappy summer road trip built by two teenage outsiders. Also worth a watch: The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s own symmetrical, dollhouse-precise detour into Anderson territory) and Delicatessen.
French movies like Tarantino: Léon and Mesrine
Fans of Tarantino’s stylish, blood-soaked crime sagas should watch Léon: The Professional (Luc Besson). It’s got a hitman, a kid he reluctantly takes under his wing, and a houseplant he treats like family — somehow every bit as cool as that sounds. For something even more sprawling and French-language, Mesrine: Killer Instinct follows the real-life gangster Jacques Mesrine with the same swagger and stylized violence.
Also worth a watch: 36 Quai des Orfèvres and Point Blank (À bout portant).
FYI — despite the Gaumont credits and a Frenchman behind the camera, Léon was actually shot in English. Want a French-language gritty spy movie instead? Jump to Nikita below.
French movies like Ocean’s Eleven: Le Cercle Rouge and Rififi
Picture Ocean’s Eleven with trench coats and total silence: that’s Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville), starring criminals so composed they barely break a sweat pulling off a jewel heist. For the heist film that started it all, go back further to Rififi (Jules Dassin) — its near-wordless, half-hour safecracking sequence is the blueprint half of Hollywood has been quietly copying ever since.
Also worth a watch: Bob le Flambeur and Le Trou.
French movies like The Hangover: Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? and Le Sens de la Fête
Love The Hangover’s loud ensemble chaos? Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? delivers it French-style, with four very different sons-in-law horrifying one very traditional set of parents. Le Sens de la Fête (C’est la vie!) trades the wedding hangover for the wedding itself, following an event planner as an entire day of catering disasters spirals gloriously out of control.
Also worth a watch: Les Tuche and Neuilly sa Mère!
Movies like Love Actually: Amélie and Paris
If you’re a fan of Love Actually-style ensemble rom-coms and haven’t seen Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain(Amélie) yet, consider this your signal. It’s the whimsical, warm-hearted French movie everyone around the world fell for years ago. Paris (Cédric Klapisch) scratches the same itch with a full ensemble cast, weaving several interlocking love stories across the city into one loosely connected whole.
Also worth a watch: On connaît la chanson and Les Émotifs Anonymes.
French movies like Gone Girl: Tell No One and Elle
If you like Gone Girl or Se7en — or other similarly tense, twisty thrillers — watch Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One). A missing wife, a decade-old secret, and a plot that keeps folding back on itself right up to the last scene. Elle, starring Isabelle Huppert in an unforgettable, unsettling performance, is darker and stranger still, and just as hard to predict.
⚠️ Attention, the trailer below has a quick bit of nudity.
Also worth a watch: L’Emploi du Temps and Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien.
French movies like The Breakfast Club: La Boum and Les Beaux Gosses
The Breakfast Club’s coming-of-age nostalgia has a French answer in La Boum. Think braces, house parties, and first heartbreak, all set to a soundtrack so unmistakably early-80s French you’ll want to look it up the moment the credits roll. For a rowdier, more recent take on teenage awkwardness, Les Beaux Gosses (The French Kissers) follows two hapless best friends through the horrors and hilarity of adolescent crushes.
Also worth a watch: LOL and Diabolo Menthe.
Movies like Oppenheimer: La Vie en Rose and Dalida
For Oppenheimer’s prestige, awards-season biopic energy, look to La Môme (released as La Vie en Rose in America). Marion Cotillard’s transformation into Édith Piaf is the kind of performance that makes an Oscar win feel like a formality.
Dalida follows another towering French singer’s life and legacy with the same sweeping, tragic grandeur.
Also worth a watch: Yves Saint Laurent and Camille Claudel 1915.
Movies like Pixar: The Triplets of Belleville and My Life as a Zucchini
Nothing from a major American studio looks or feels like Les Triplettes de Belleville (The Triplets of Belleville) — practically wordless and wildly inventive, it’s the arthouse cousin of Pixar-style animated family adventures. My Life as a Zucchini (Ma vie de Courgette) is gentler and stop-motion, and handles a genuinely difficult subject — a boy adjusting to life in foster care — with the same warmth and emotional honesty Pixar built its name on.
Also worth a watch: The Illusionist, a quieter, melancholy hand-drawn film with that same wordless, painterly style, and Persepolis, animated and just as striking, though considerably more serious in subject matter.
Movies like Knives Out: 8 Femmes and Le Prénom
Knives Out and Glass Onion fans, meet 8 Femmes (8 Women): François Ozon packs an entire generation of French cinema royalty — Deneuve, Huppert, Béart, Ardant — into one house, one murder, and several genuinely great musical numbers. Le Prénom (What’s in a Name?) swaps the murder for a dinner-party secret, but delivers the same escalating, ensemble-cast unraveling as the night goes on.
Also worth a watch: Potiche, a stylish comedy where a trophy wife quietly outmaneuvers her husband’s entire factory, and Crime d’Amour (Love Crime), a twistier corporate thriller built around office rivalry and betrayal.
Movies like La La Land: Populaire and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Swap the jazz pianist for a 1950s speed-typing contest and you’ve basically got Populaire — La La Land’s sweeping, technicolor romance, French-style, and arguably even more fun. For the film that arguably inspired La La Land in the first place, go back to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), a sung-through, candy-colored romance from the 1960s.
Also worth a watch: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, an even sunnier, more colorful sung-and-danced romance with twin sisters, sailors, and a traveling fair at its center.
More French movies like…
Already amoureux.se of a French film or actor and searching for more movie recommendations? Here’s what to watch next.
French movies like Breathless: The 400 Blows and Pierrot le Fou
Staying in La Nouvelle Vague — aka the French New Wave — a little longer pays off after Breathless (À bout de souffle): The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) is Truffaut’s aching, semi-autobiographical debut, while Pierrot le Fou is Jean-Luc Godard again, but even more unhinged and in color.
Also worth a watch: Cléo de 5 à 7, Agnès Varda’s real-time wander through Paris, made the same era.
More like La Science des rêves: Mood Indigo
Loved La Science des rêves? L’Écume des jours (Mood Indigo) has that same dreamlike, handmade quality — a love story that starts sweet and slowly gets swallowed by surreal, physical manifestations of grief, not unlike the shifting memory-scapes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Also worth a watch: Delicatessen, for more of that same handmade strangeness.
French movies like Léon: The Professional: Nikita
Léon: The Professional has a spiritual predecessor in La Femme Nikita. It’s the story of a death-row criminal is secretly recruited and trained as a government assassin, then has to fight her way back to something like a normal life. It’s arguably the film that invented the “assassin with a conscience” genre now taken for granted.
Also worth a watch: Anna, a slicker, more recent take on the same setup, with a model moonlighting as a KGB operative.
French movies like Le Cercle Rouge: Le Samouraï
Le Samouraï trades the heist for a hitman, but keeps the same trench-coated stillness and near-total silence — one of the films that taught an entire generation of directors how to shoot quiet instead of noise.
Also worth a watch: Un Flic, a colder, late-career cops-and-robbers standoff with that same minimalist chill.
French movies like Intouchables: Hors normes (The Specials)
Intouchables fans should follow up with Hors normes (The Specials). In place of the wealthy-quadriplegic-and-caregiver setup, it follows two men running unofficial support networks for autistic kids the system has failed. But it’s got the same big-hearted, comedy-shot-through-drama energy. No coincidence given that it comes from the same directing duo, Toledano and Nakache.
Also worth a watch: Monsieur Chocolat (2016), a Belle Époque biopic that gives Omar Sy another great role, this time as real-life circus performer Rafael Padilla.
French movies like Amélie: Delicatessen and Micmacs
Already devoted to Amélie? Delicatessen and Micmacs have that same handmade, quirky magic — cluttered, storybook-like worlds full of oddball characters — just with a darker sense of humor underneath. Both are earlier films from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director behind Amélie.
French movies like La Haine: Les Misérables and Girlhood
Not to be confused with the famous French-Revolution novel and musical, Ladj Ly’s Oscar-nominated Les Misérables (2019) is the closest thing French cinema has made to a spiritual successor to La Haine. Based on real events, it tells the story of a day in the modern Paris suburbs, including a world-cup win and explosive run-ins with the police.
Girlhood (Bande de filles), Céline Sciamma’s portrait of a teenage girl finding her footing in the Paris banlieues, shares the same unflinching eye for young people navigating a system stacked against them.
Also worth a watch: Dheepan, Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or winner about refugees caught up in violence on a Paris housing estate.
French movies like Blue Is the Warmest Colour: Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Water Lilies
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) trades the heat of Blue Is the Warmest Colour for something slower and quieter — but lands just as hard. Sciamma’s earlier Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) covers similar ground from a teenage vantage point, all longing and rivalry at the edge of a swimming pool.
Also worth a watch: Été 85 (Summer of 85), a first-love-and-loss coming-of-age romance set over one intense summer on the Normandy coast.
Where to watch French movies with English subtitles in Paris
Bonne nouvelle — if you’re in the City of Light, you don’t need to hunt down subtitles alone or wait for a French film to land on Netflix.
Lost in Frenchlation screens French movies with English subtitles in Paris at various independent cinemas around town. Most events kick off with a cocktail hour where you can meet other expats, students, and francophiles before the movie starts, and quite a few are followed by a Q&A with someone from the film’s cast or crew.
It’s a great way to turn “watching a French movie” into an actual night out, so if you’re in France and craving a proper French movie night, it’s worth building an evening around their schedule.
Frequently asked questions about French movies
Are French movies dubbed or subtitled on streaming platforms?
Most major platforms give you the choice, but availability varies by title and region. When you have the option, subtitled (VOST) is worth choosing over dubbed (VF) — you keep the original performances, and it’s a genuinely good way to pick up French along the way.
What’s a good French movie to watch if I don’t speak French?
Start with something visual and character-driven rather than dialogue-heavy — Amélie or The Triplets of Belleville are both easy entry points, since the story carries even if you’re leaning on subtitles the whole way through.
Is French cinema very different from Hollywood movies?
Pacing is the biggest difference — French films tend to sit longer with a scene or a silence rather than cutting away, and endings are often more ambiguous. Genre lines are also blurrier: it’s common for a French comedy to have a genuinely sad undercurrent, or a thriller to slow down for character moments a Hollywood film would cut.
Where can I watch French films with English subtitles?
Streaming platforms are the most reliable bet, though catalogs shift often, so it’s worth checking a few. Some cities also run French film festivals or repertory-cinema series with subtitled screenings, so it’s worth a quick search for francophone cultural events near you.
Don’t stop discovering
But this is just the beginning. Browse more of our film and TV coverage for reviews, deep dives, and more recommendations to add to your watchlist.
