Charly Mattei has turned over a new leaf and left his criminal past behind. For three years now he has been leading a peaceful existence dedicated to his wife and their two children. However, one winter morning, he is left for dead in a parking lot in the old port of Marseille, his body riddled with 22 bullets. To everyone’s general astonishment, he doesn’t die. Based on real facts, the story has been reinvented within the Marseille gangster underworld.

Actors : Jean Reno, Kad Merad, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Marina Foïs, Luc Palun, Richard Berry, Joey Starr, Dominique Thomas, Martial Bezot, Daniel Lundh.

Trailer for the movie L’immortel:

On July 16-17, 1942, over 13,000 Jews were arrested in Paris and its suburbs by French police who were zealous supporters of the German occupiers. Most were kept at Paris’ Velodrome d’Hiver sports stadium; many were sent on to Auschwitz. The operation was ordered by France’s Vichy government. A movie about possibly the biggest tragedy in the history of France. La rafle follows the little boy Joseph Weismann, who was ten years of age when he, his family and his friends were arrested by the French police. All people in the film, and all of the action, are based on true stories.

With: Jean Reno, Gad Elmaleh, Mélanie Laurent, Samuel Le Bihan, Sylvie Testud, Anne Brochet, Catherine Allégret, Udo Schenk.

Trailer for the movie La rafle (The round-up):

Based on a novel by Emile Zola, La Bete Humaine weaves a mesmerizing tale of a tragic triangle. Train engineer Jean Gabin lusts after Simone Simon, the wife of his co-worker Fernand Ledoux. When Ledoux is in danger of losing his job, Simon offers herself to her husband’s boss. In jealous pique, Ledoux kills the man. Gabin is witness to this, so Simon promises to reward him sexually if he’ll keep quiet. As this romance intensifies, Simon tries to finagle Gabin into killing Ledoux. Sick of the whole sordid affair, Gabin murders Simon and then kills himself.

With: Jean Gabin, Simone Simon, Fernand Ledoux.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir’s masterpiece THE RULES OF THE GAME is a devastating satire of the pre-WWII French aristocracy. Starring Marcel Dalio as wealthy landowner Marquis Robert de la Chesnaye, it charts the shifting relationships among the guests at a weekend hunting party on his vast estate. The guest list includes Robert’s mistress Genevieve (Mila Parely), from whom he’s trying to part, and Andre Jurieu (Roland Toutain), a famed aviator who is in love with Robert’s wife, Christine (Nora Gregor). As they begin a dizzy dance of escape and pursuit, their games are observed and echoed by the servants below the stairs. The gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot) is trying to keep the poacher, Marceau (Julien Carette), from poaching on his pretty wife, Lisette (Paulette Dubost), unaware that his boss also has his eye on her. The passionate Jurieu, the only guest incapable of the appropriate hypocrisy, finds Christine in an embrace with a random lover (Pierre Nay), and the startled woman decides to leave Robert and go away with the aviator. Renoir’s subtle deployment of long tracking shots in multiplanar deep focus reveals the relations of both groups and individuals as he dismantles the rituals of hypocrisy that make this society run smoothly.

With: Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély.

Probably the most loved of Renoir’s films, certainly the most feted, dealing as it does with the common bonds between men across national, class and religious barriers. In WWI, three French soldiers – played by Pierre Fresnay, Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio – become POWs under the monocle of a German commander memorably incarnated by Erich Von Stroheim, who as a director had been a great inspiration to Renoir.

With: Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay.

Jean, a former filmmaker who lives in voluntary retirement in a Parisian clinic, in spite of being diagnosed sane, is visited by his niece Carmen who asks if she and some friends can borrow his apartment, ostensibly to do some film tests for a wealthy patron. However, this is a cover for a kidnap plot concocted by Carmen and her lover Joseph, and she uses her uncle to set up the tycoon victim unwittingly. Passion, jealousy and betrayal follow, as the police prevent the kidnapping and the kidnapping gang are all shot, apart from Joseph.

With: Maruschka Detmers, Jacques Bonnaffé, Myriem Roussel.

Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.

With: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani.

Trailer:

Parisian judge Jeanne Charmant Killman has recently sanctioned the arrest of CEO Michel Humeau in a high-profile case of corruption and embezzlement at a giant state-supported company. As her investigation and interrogations proceed, Killman uncovers an immense scandal reaching into the highest levels of government. The more dangerous the secrets she reveals, the more powerful she becomes. However, under the pressure of her sudden influence and renown, Killman’s private life begins to unravel, and she finds herself probing both the limits of her own power and its intoxicating grip.

With: With Isabelle Huppert, François Berléand, Patrick Bruel.

Two French cops (Jean Reno and Vincent Cassell) investigating separate murders in the French Alps find a link between the killings — both of which involve mutilated corpses with severed hands. As more murders occur, the two policemen uncover an increasing number of horrific details behind the crimes. French director Mathieu Kassovitz filmed the psychological thriller on location in the Alps, offering a beautiful backdrop to a frightening film.

With: Jean Reno, Vincent Cassel, Nadia Farès, Dominique Sanda, Karim Belkhadra.

Trailer: