French DVDs

Francois Truffaut's masterpiece "The 400 Blows" was followed by four more films about Antoine Doinel, its melancholic, idealistic hero. All five films are now available in an essential boxed set.

France's biggest export since the croissant is set to conquer a nation starved for happiness: But "Amélie," an unabashedly cheerful ode to life's small pleasures, is too cute for its own good.

Jean-Luc Godard set out to break all the rules, but "Band of Outsiders" remains his most charming and accessible film.

The French classic finds new life on DVD. Ice cold beauty Catherine Deneuve lures you in; insightful commentary offers clarity to surrealist Bunuel's inscrutable intentions.

The lovely Emmanuelle Beart plays the violin in this wise and touching film about love.

Brigitte Bardot shares the screen with Fritz Lang and Jack Palance in Jean-Luc Godard's absorbing 1963 film about love and the movies.

Daniel Auteil and Gerard Depardieu ham it up in Francis Veber's comedy about an accountant in a condom factory who pretends to be gay to keep his job.

The botanist, the bishop, the milkman, and his lover: Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert, the team that gave the world "Children of Paradise," made this very silly movie in 1937.

In this lovely French film by Claude Berri, middle-aged divorcé Jean-Pierre Bacri finds solace with his irrepressible young housekeeper (Émilie Dequenne.) Can their improbable affair work out?

Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno exude movie star charisma in this delightful romance about two miserable souls who meet cute in the midst of a Paris airstrike. Daniele Thompson directs from the screenplay she co-wrote with her son.

Leos Carax' delirious 1991 love story about a homelss couple is wildly poetic and always surprising. Juliette Binoche plays a painter who is losing her sight and falls for a fire eater who makes his home on the Pont Neuf in the heart of Paris. At the time, "Les Amants Du Point-Neuf" was the most expensive French film ever made.

In 1955, Alain Resnais made the first documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. Almost 50 years and literally hundreds of Holocaust movies later, it is still the most devastating film of its kind. The masterpiece that Francois Truffaut called "the greatest movie ever made" is now available on Criterion DVD.

Jean Gabin is utterly winning in this supremely entertaining crime classic set in the exotic maze of the Casbah.

Julie Lopes-Curval's ensemble drama about locals living in a run-down working-class resort town on the French seaside is deceptively simple and leisurely paced, but if you have the patience, the film becomes increasingly engrossing.

In times like these, what better escape from the news than French slapstick? Jean Reno and Christian Clavier clown their way through this 1993 time-travelling comedy, now out on DVD.

Dominik Moll's morbid thriller, hands down one of the best movies of the year, is out on DVD. Don't miss it.

The two-disc DVD of Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game" does the celebrated 1939 film justice with lavish bonus materials that examine its troubled history, controversial reception, and influental legacy.