For any serious cinephile, all roads lead to France. For many, French movies are the final frontier of film fandom: painfully stylish and achingly cool, with philosophical underpinnings and experimental structures that more mainstream audiences can find impenetrable. And certainly, some of that stereotyping is based in truth – pioneering New Wavers like Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda prided themselves on their intellect. But once you start exploring French cinema, it’s not difficult to see why it’s had such a powerful influence on global moviemaking – and that it’s not nearly as highfalutin’ and alienating as it can sometimes seem.

We understand that leaping in can be intimidating, though. So we’ve ranked the 100 best French movies ever made, less to craft a definitive canon but to give

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