Best French films

Travel in France is currently fraught with difficulties, but the treasures of the country’s cinema remain available to us all at the touch of a few buttons. Here are five of the most acclaimed French films from the past five years:

My Life as a Courgette

With a running time of only 66 minutes, this stop-motion animation about a boy growing up in a rural children’s home is a marvel of tender grace – often funny, but far tougher than most films about childhood. Visually, it’s wonderfully simple, and its characters’ huge, modelling-clay faces are often miraculously expressive.

Faces Places

Agnès Varda, the New Wave director, was 89 when she made this film with JR, an artist known for flyposting huge photos on the sides of buildings. It follows the pair as they pootle around rural France, taking pictures and displaying them. Their interactions with each other and with the people they meet are intriguing and moving.

Custody

First-time director Xavier Legrand wowed audiences at the Venice Film Festival with this film about domestic abuse. Starting off as a raw, social-realist account of a bitter custody battle over a child, it evolves into a heart-stopping thriller.

120 BPM

Based on the memories of its director, Robin Campillo, 120 BPM traces a love affair between two men working together in 1980s Paris as activists in the fight against Aids. The shadow of death is everpresent in the film and, partly as a result, it brims with a euphoric sense of life.

Elle

Controversial director Paul Verhoeven ( Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers)

returns to his European roots for this film about a rape and its aftermath. His most provocative and darkly satirical work to date, it works thanks mainly to Isabelle Huppert’s astonishing central performance.