The 54 best movies set in Paris

The notion of a domestically-based 'ethnological study' dates at least from Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. But what distinguishes this attempt by Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin to 'bottle' the climate of Paris circa 1960 is their camera's candid assumption of its own disruptively active presence: interviewees are introduced to each other, form groups, and may well (in one case) have got married after shooting was over...

Jean-Claude Aimini plays that familiar figure of '60s cinema, the young man awaiting his call-up papers. He works in a TV studio (very droll, these scenes) where he meets two girls, best friends, whom he joins for a holiday in Corsica. Relationships flare and fizzle, ending with the girls on the quayside and the lad on board the ship, the war in Algeria beckoning. Rozier's methods were improvisational...

‘Cléo from 5 to 7’ was French new waver Agnès Varda’s second feature and is filled with the beauty of Paris’s natural light. ‘Hold on, pretty butterfly!’ says Cléo (Corinne Marchand, pictured), a fretful and fame-occupied singer, to herself as she prepares to roam the city for two hours while awaiting a possibly momentous doctor’s verdict. It’s experimental and free-wheeling in design – Varda gives us overlapping dialogue and parodic inserts...

This classic 'photo-roman' about the power of memory - 'the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood' - begins at Orly airport a few years before WWIII. That image is of a woman's face at the end of the pier, and in the post-apocalyptic world the man now inhabits as a prisoner, he is given the chance to discover its true significance as a guinea pig in a time travel experiment. Marker uses monochrome images recognisably from the past...

In 1962, the French New Wave’s most avid bookworm released an adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel ‘Jules et Jim’. It was François Truffaut’s second adaptation (and his third feature film), but this one was special: the young tyro director and the art collector from another era (Roché had died in 1959, aged 80) came together like, well, Jules and Jim. Roche’s autobiographical story of a Frenchman, Jim (Henri Serre) and a German...

First in the popular series that has repeatedly sidetracked Edwards ever since, with Sellers' death not even staunching the flow. Live-action cartoonery had been underworked since Tashlin mapped its possibilities with Jerry Lewis, but the novelty value of Sellers' disaster-prone Inspector Clouseau, funny French accent and all, wore off quicker than its commercial value. The eponymous diamond, which reappeared...

One of Godard's most sheerly enjoyable movies, a dazzling amalgam of film noir and science fiction in which tough gumshoe Lemmy Caution turns inter-galactic agent to re-enact the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice by conquering Alpha 60, the strange automated city from which such concepts as love and tenderness have been banished. As in Antonioni's The Red Desert (made the previous year), Godard's theme is alienation in a technological society...

At the time, Richard Williams' credit titles were thought to be better than the film they introduced. In retrospect, it is clear that while Woody Allen, who wrote the script and appears as the hero's friend, saw it as a satire on womanising - the O'Toole character is based on Warren Beatty - Clive Donner saw it as a morality tale in the form of a farce. The mixed results are entertaining, if flawed. O'Toole is the promiscuous hero...

A perverse valentine to this coolest of Gallic beauties, Belle de jour stars Catherine Deneuve as Séverine, a Parisian housewife dressed in Yves Saint Laurent, who is married to Pierre (Sorel), a handsome, dull doctor. Séverine makes fervent protestations of love but cannot, alas, consummate; instead, she succumbs to theatrically erotic reveries — of being whipped by two burly coachmen, pelted with shit while wearing a diaphanous white gown...

Tati's Hulot on the loose in a surreal, scarcely recognisable Paris, tangling intermittently with a troop of nice American matrons on a 24-hour trip. Not so much a saga of the individual against an increasingly dehumanised decor, it's more a semi-celebratory symphony to Tati's sensational city-set, all reflections and rectangles, steel, chrome, gleaming sheet metal and trompe l'oeil plate glass. Shot in colour that looks almost like monochrome...

Melville's special achievement was to relocate the American gangster film to France and to incorporate his own steely poetic and philosophical obsessions. He described his penultimate film as a digest of the nineteen definitive underworld set-ups that could be found in John Huston's picture of doomed gangsters, The Asphalt Jungle. Darker, more abstract and desolate than his earlier work, this shows, set piece by set piece, the breakdown of...

The Francis Bacon paintings that haunt the opening credits are the first hint that life might be both torturous and beautiful in Bertolucci’s unforgettable portrait of grief and anonymous sex in 1970s Paris. The city looks to have been built uniquely for the occasion as Brando – then 48, with shoulder-length greying hair, and still so striking – gives his best performance in years as Paul, an American mourning his wife’s suicide. He finds solace in the bed of...

The last of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales sees its hero married - in contrast to the protagonists of the earlier films, who were merely contemplating marriage - and resisting the temptation of an affair, almost out of perversity. Equally, the film is a homage to the late afternoon - seen by Rohmer as a sunny parallel to 3am and the dark night of the soul - the time Bernard Verley eccentrically chooses as his regular lunchtime. A formal, elegant examination of...

Three-and-a-half hours of people talking about sex sounds like a recipe for boredom; in Eustache's hands, it is anything but. There is no 'explicitness': the film is about attitudes to, and defences against, sex and the body. Using dialogue from real-life conversations and sticking entirely to a prepared script (no improvisation), Eustache has provided us with a ruthlessly sharp-eyed view of chic, supposedly liberated sexual...

They meet, like Alice and the White Rabbit, in a sun-dappled French park, amateur illusionist Celine (Juliet Berto) bounding heedlessly past studious librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier). One dropped scarf and a lengthy foot-chase later, these two effusive ladies with catlike curiosity are practically inseparable — so much so that they can try on each other’s identities like best friends swapping favourite apparel. Celine is Julie, Julie is Celine...

A marvellous amalgam of sadistic thriller and fairytale romance, drawing on a wild diversity of genres from film noir to Feuillade serial. The deliriously offhand plot, cheekily parodying Watergates and French Connections, has switched tapes setting a pair of psychopathic hoods on the trail of a young postal messenger, turning his obsessive dream - of romance with a beautiful black opera singer whose performance on stage he has secretly recorded...

15-year-old Suzanne (Bonnaire) seems unable to progress beyond doleful promiscuity in her relations with boys. Alone of her family, her father (played by Pialat himself) understands her, but when he leaves home for another woman, family life erupts into a round of appalling, casual violence until Suzanne escapes into a fast marriage and finally to America. Pialat's methods of close, intimate filming may place him close...

Polanski's thriller boasts several superb set pieces, even if it doesn't quite snap shut on the mind the way Chinatown did. Dr Walker (Ford) checks into a Paris hotel with his wife (Buckley) to attend a conference. She has collected the wrong suitcase at the airport, their problems escalate, and to watch how Polanski calibrates the build-up of disquiet in a standard hotel suite until the wife disappears is deeply satisfying...

Following a spell in a hostel for the homeless, after he is injured by a hit-and-run driver, fire-eater Alex (Lavant) returns to his open-air home on Paris's oldest bridge. There, besides his drugs supplier Hans (Gruber), he finds a new tenant: Michèle (Binoche), a middle-class art student who has taken to the streets for as long as her failing sight holds. Tentatively, Alex and Michèle embark on a drunken, anarchic, mutually healing affair...

Failing to find the courage to commit suicide after her husband and infant daughter die in a car crash, Julie (Binoche) decides to build a new, anonymous and wholly independent life. Leaving her country mansion for a Paris apartment, she soon finds that freedom is not as easy to achieve as she hoped. Neighbours seek help and friendship, and doubts about her husband's fidelity inflame jealousy. Most troubling, there's the music...

Twenty-four hours in the Paris projects: an Arab boy is critically wounded in hospital, gut-shot, and a police revolver has found its way into the hands of a young Jewish skinhead, Vinz (Cassel), who vows to even the score if his pal dies. Vinz hangs out with Hubert (Koundé) and Saïd (Taghmaoui). They razz each other about films, cartoons, nothing in particular, but always the gun hovers over them like a death sentence...

Arguably the quintessential subtitled film for people who don’t like subtitled films (it’d be a dust-up between this and ‘Cinema Paradiso’), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s rose-tinted Parisian romance is wheeled out once more to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Likely to be the role for which actress Audrey Tautou will be remembered until her dying day, the film is all the more interesting for remaining an eccentric one-of-a-kind that feels every bit the product of...

Rivette revisits familiar ground with this leisurely tale of romantic intrigue and possibly dark deeds among members of a theatrical troupe and their various acquaintances. While it certainly lacks the edge of Paris Nous Appartient, it nevertheless exerts immense charm. Balibar is the Parisian diva returning after three years in Italy in the production of Pirandello's Come tu mi vuoi; Castellitto is her lover, leading man and manager...

Another post-modern mix of myth, musical, comedy, romance and unfettered pastiche from the impressively inventive Luhrmann, here ransacking pop culture's iconographic archives - rather than the real Paris of 1900 - to mount a hyperkinetic update of the Orpheus myth. Naive, lovelorn writer/composer Christian (McGregor) is taken up by bohemians like Toulouse-Lautrec to put on a show at the scandalous showplace of the title...

Irreversible pitches you straight into the abyss, revealing Cassel pounded to a pulp and his assailant's head staved in with a fire extinguisher. It then swivels into the past, negotiating the real-time agony of Bellucci being raped in an underpass, regressing ever backwards into the chaste light of earlier that day. Rest assured, it all ends happily ever before. The title doesn't merely toy with the idea of undoing time, corruption, ruin and such shackles...

Bertolucci's engrossing, elegant film is a seductive adaptation by Gilbert Adair of his novel The Holy Innocents. In Paris, as a student in the spring of 1968, Matthew (Pitt) is a young American usually found glued to the smoke-stained silver screen at the Palais de Chaillot. There, during a demo against the government's firing of Henri Langlois as head of the Cinémathèque, he meets and falls in with Isabelle (Green) and Théo (Garrel)...

The new century is shaping up to be a fine time for world animation, not least for child's eye features packed with the old-fashioned virtues of fantasy, adventure, ingenuity and derring-do - and more or less faithful to traditional cel-animation aesthetics. Miyakazi's Spirited Away may have the scale and sweep to josh with Pixar's Finding Nemo, but clock the Francophone 'toons: Senegalese fair tale Kirikou and the Sorceress, the Tintin-esque Bécassine...

At first, Kechiche’s follow-up to the admirable ‘La Faute à Voltaire’ looks set to be a fairly routine account of life in the Maghrebi hood, with 15-year-old Krimo mooning over Lydia while his ex insists to any kid who’ll listen that they haven’t in fact split up. But what makes it all so interesting is that Lydia’s practising a Marivaux play, so Krimo – against all expectations, including his own...

It looks like a walk in the park – and a coffee stop, and a float down the Seine – but Linklater’s magic-hour impromptu lights up passions and possibilities most films don’t dream of. A more seasoned follow-up to ‘Before Sunrise’, in which Ethan Hawke’s rambling young American and Julie Delpy’s French student waxed romantic over one charmed night in Vienna, it’s some companion piece: a modest resumption of a love story...

Garrel’s leisurely, bittersweet revisitation of May ‘68 and its discontents, which won him the directing prize at Venice, is something of a pensive answer-song to Bertolucci’s silly sexfest ‘The Dreamers’, especially in casting one of its stars – who just happens to be Garrel’s lookalike son, Louis – in the lead role. Perhaps a temporary moratorium on les événements can be declared for cineastes d’un certain age...

Jacques Audiard (‘A Self-Made Hero’, ‘Read My Lips’) translates to modern-day Paris the dilemmas of James Toback’s 1978, New York-set ‘Fingers’ – the story of a young man caught between art and crime, between his own ambitions and those of his father – in an audacious move that reverses the old chestnut that you should ignore the remake...

Georges (Auteuil) hosts a TV literary chat-show and discovers the drawbacks to celebrity when he and his wife Anne (Binoche) start receiving videotapes of their comings and goings filmed outside the house and wrapped in childlike drawings evocative of bloody violence. Even when the tapes’ contents suggest the anonymous sender has some intimate knowledge of – and murderous intent towards – Georges’ life...

Pricked, perhaps, by the violent critical reaction to the invasive, incestuous excursions of his Georges Batailles adaptation, ‘Ma Mère’, the talented young French director Christophe Honoré lightens up for his latest drama, where he invokes and embraces the jump-cut, improvisatory and chic-ly attitudinising spirit of his beloved French New Wave. Playing thoughtful cinematic games with the personas of his two lead actors...

18 films, 20 directors, one city. Here’s how it goes: the looser the theme, the more erratic this sort of portmanteau picture usually is, and, as themes go, the entire French capital is about as baggy as the shorts of an American tourist checking out paintings in the Loo-verer. It’s no shock then that this collection of films about love in the City of the Light, each written and directed by a different filmmaker from Tom Tykwer to Walter Salles...

The title of Pixar’s fabulous animation gives you its three elegantly dovetailed elements: rodents, food and French. Co-director Jan Pinkava’s original idea was sweetly ridiculous – can a naive, ambitious rat (baby-eyed Remy, charmingly voiced by Patton Oswalt), long inspired by his reading of a famous French chef’s recipe book, realise his dream to become a chef?...

They loll about in their lingerie, young ladies waiting for clients to enter the opulent foyer of the brothel L'Apollonide; it's 1899, and such French "houses of tolerance" are scattered throughout Paris. Some prostitutes cater to certain peccadilloes, from "doll acts" to the colonialist kink of sleeping with an Algerian like Samira (The Secret of the Grain's Herzi) or, as the Dreyfus affair looms in the background, a "Jewess" like Madeline (Barnole)...

What an exceptionally un-Martin Scorsese-like film ‘Hugo’ appears to be on the surface: a 3D festive kids’ adventure with a boo-hiss baddie set on the not-so-mean streets of 1930s Paris. And yet it is possible this is one of the director’s most personal films: a love letter to cinema, to the magical emotional imperfection of celluloid just as its days are numbered. It’s a film about making films, about losing your heart – and finding yourself – in a pitch-black movie...

Cinema feeds on stories of love and death, but how often do filmmakers really offer new or challenging perspectives on either? Michael Haneke’s ‘Amour’ is devastatingly original and unflinching in the way it examines the effect of love on death and vice versa. It’s a staggering, intensely moving look at old age and life’s end, which at its heart offers two performances of incredible skill and wisdom from French veteran actors...

‘Weird! Weird! It’s so weird!’ That’s not a quote from a punter leaving a screening of French eccentric Leos Carax’s first feature film in 13 years (he’s still best known for 1991’s ‘Les Amants du Pont-Neuf'), though it could be. No, they’re the elated words of an on-screen photographer after encountering perhaps the most alarming of the guises adopted by the film’s shape-shifting anti-hero, Oscar (an astonishing Denis Lavant)...

Olivier Assayas’s ‘Something in the Air’ is swooning and swirling but always a level-headed study of the lives of a small group of suburban Parisian teenagers in the years soon after 1968. An ensemble drama with a pleasingly light touch, it looks back with warmth and candour at the lives of these young people as they confront their beliefs, their loves, and their ambitions head-on. So it’s a coming-of-age story for all time in one sense...

Movies about the AIDS epidemic frequently tend towards the melodramatic, but Robin Campillo’s docudrama balances the gravity of the moment with such lively dialogue and naturalistic performances that the inevitable tears feel earned rather than manipulated. Centred around members of the ’90s activist group ACT UP Paris, and focusing on the budding romance between two campaigners in particular, it captures the anger many young Parisians – including Campillo, a self-described ‘ACT UP militant’ – felt toward the French government’s slow response to the crisis, but also their determination to not fade away without a fight. 

Not a ton of action flicks use Paris as a backdrop – it almost feels untoward to use such a romantic setting as a site for explosions and shootouts. But the Mission: Impossible franchise is so sleek and epic that it fits the city’s upscale grandeur like a $1,300 Prada glove. For the series’ sixth instalment, Tom Cruise’s embattled secret agent Ethan Hunt travels to the City of Lights to retrieve rogue agent-turned-terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), sending him racing around the Arc de Triomphe on a motorcycle, improvising a daring escape on the River Seine and parachuting onto the roof of the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées. You’ve truly never seen the Parisian landscape used in such a way. 

In this lightly comedic romantic drama from The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet director Jacques Audiard, four twentysomethings – three women, one man – become intertwined in an on-off friendship-slash-love affair. Based loosely on stories by American cartoonist Adrian Tomine – with a screenplay by Léa Mysius and Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma – it’s a potent examination of millennial love and sex. It’s a minor work in the broader Audiard canon, but it’s still damn sexy – and the crisp black-and-white cinematography lends the 13th arrondissement a mythical cool on par with Woody Allen’s Manhattan.