Frennch Film Festival 2026

I wasn't able to do justice to this year's French Film Festival, which is a pity. I usually enjoy those. However, I have caught up with a couple of entries

Cédric Jimenez' Chien 51 / Dog 51 proved to be a frog A-feature entry in the Blade Runner, Children of Men, Edge of Tomorrow line.

They start as they mean to go, with a metallic clang in the music track and a homeless mob herded at the crossing between residential zones of 2045 Paris. Significantly, black drones hover. Pretty soon a shooting in his flat courtyard takes out the inventor of the police force’s new super tool Alma, the computer that does ultra-accurate hypertheticals on crimes.

Scruffy, down-graded cop Gilles Lellouche is called into HQ, saying “two sugars” to younger female superior Adèle Exarchopoulos from Blue is the Warmest Colour, who has him on the carpet without offering coffee.

Jiminez (Bac-nord, November) has marked his territory with these. Lots of racing along motorways in the rain at night. Grisled Lelouche just about gets by as an action hero, diving off a Seine bridge to go frogman in the city sewers and bending the rules to look after charity worker Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. As with Edge of Tomorrow the best scene, which comes towards the end here, is Exarchopoulos’ corridor shootout with a couple of drones.

Dog 51 - Exarchopoulos

The elements are uneven. A popcorn movie, albeit a distopic European one, doesn’t benefit from such a grim ending. Putting  up a subservient, incapable authority structure headed up by celebrity support actors -  Louis Garrel, Romain Duris, Artus - plays less well than setting it in a grimy, rubbish-strewn concrete underground Paris, where Lellouche surfaces from his sewer dive to see the Eiffel Tower still in place, across the moonlit Seine, reminding him how beautiful it used to be, the film’s best moment.

Craftsmanship and performances could sustain a better film.

The talking point on Vie Privée/Private Life is that we get Jodie Foster speaking French, dropping in the odd English phrase. As with the Robert Wise West Side Story, the first word on the track is “Shit!” Jodie gets one English-language scene with documentary maker Frederick Wiseman, who plays her former mentor. Supporting her, we get French-speaking celebrities, who don’t have their normal share of the action. Virginie Efira is particularly underused, just manifesting as glamorous in flashbacks.

Jodie is a Paris-based psychiatrist whose patient, Virginie, is murdered and the resentful husband, Mathieu Amalric, throws Jodie out of the Jewish funeral. How does this involve Aunt Aurore Clement’s will? It all gets mixed in with Comédie Française actor Noam Morgensztern, as another patient. His years of therapy for a smoking habit were less productive than one visit to hypnotist Sophie Guillemin. Meanwhile, Jodie has family encounters with amorous optometrist ex-husband Dan Auteuil, (he helps her steal Amazon deliveries) and supper with son Vincent Lacoste and his wife Park Ji-min (Return to Seoul/Retour à Séoul) - good cast punching below their weight.

 Zlotowski

Jodie’s career as a Freudian is central. The gendarmes she complains to exchange smirks and she begins to have her own doubts. Throw in a scarlet dream sequence with a symphony orchestra and Nazis. This is all largely tongue in cheek but the film has a disturbing moment worthy of a top-line film noir, as Jodie climbs her apartment block stairs and hears the lost mini-disk of the session with her dead patient, playing in her apartment.

In the line of The Lady in the Car With the Glasses & the Gun, this one is more interesting before it all gets explained. Vie Privée is also a companion piece to  writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski’s Les enfants des autres and Planetarium, again having celebrity leads front up uneven dramas, but this one is better than those.

The copy on view is dark and grainy. This may be intentional but its stills and trailer look better.

Private Life-  Foster

Barrie Pattison 2026