French films about self-defense

How can a split-second decision change your life? While investigating noises in his house one balmy Texas night in 1989, Richard Dane puts a bullet in the brain of low-life burglar Freddy Russell. Although he’s hailed as a small-town hero, Dane soon finds himself fearing for his family’s safety when Freddy’s ex-con father, Ben, rolls into town, hell-bent on revenge.

A group of cooks at an asylum for the criminally insane get locked in with the inmates during a massive thunderstorm

Given the country's overcrowded prisons, the U.S. government begins to allow 12-hour periods of time in which all illegal activity is legal. During one of these free-for-alls, a family must protect themselves from a home invasion.

When Michèle, the CEO of a gaming software company, is attacked in her home by an unknown assailant, she refuses to let it alter her precisely ordered life. She manages crises involving family, all the while becoming engaged in a game of cat and mouse with her stalker.

A catholic French couple sees their life upside down when their four daughters get married to men of different religion and origins.

An American writer moves to Paris to be closer to his daughter and finds himself falling immediately on hard times.

An alcoholic writer is visited by an incarnation of his cancer.

Marcel Marx, a former bohemian and struggling author, has given up his literary ambitions and relocated to the port city Le Havre. He leads a simple life based around his wife Arletty, his favourite bar and his not too profitable profession as a shoeshiner. As Arletty suddenly becomes seriously ill, Marcel's path crosses with an underage illegal immigrant from Africa, who needs Marcel's help to hide from the police.

When the fun loving Marie sets her eyes on brooding comic book artist Paul, it sets off the kind of romantic sparks that quickly culminate in the bedroom. But the next morning brings its share of surprises as Marie crawls out of bed to discover her life flash-forwarded fifteen years down the road: Not only has she been married to Paul all this time, but she’s now the mother of a little boy the head of a powerful multinational investment firm and the proprietor of a fabulous apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Quickly Marie discovers that all her achievements have not brought happiness.

Octave Parango, the former concept creator/editor of 99 francs has become a model scout in Moscow. This cynical hedonist leads a very pleasant life in the arms of young Russian models and in the private jets of his oligarch friends... until the day that he is contacted by The Ideal, the world's leading cosmetic's firm, embroiled in a huge media scandal. Our antihero has seven days to find a new muse by traveling through the confines of post-Communist Russia, under the orders of Valentine Winfield, a hard and authoritarian visual director.

The Côte d’Azur. 1915. In his twilight years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is tormented by the loss of his wife, the pains of arthritic old age and the terrible news that his son Jean has been wounded in action. But when a young girl miraculously enters his world, the old painter is filled with a new, wholly unexpected energy. Blazing with life, radiantly beautiful, Andrée will become his last model, and the wellspring of a remarkable rejuvenation. Back at the family home to convalesce, Jean too falls under the spell of the new, redheaded star in the Renoir firmament. In their Mediterranean Eden - and in the face of his father's fierce opposition - he falls in love with this wild, untameable spirit... and as he does so, within weak-willed, battle-shaken Jean, a filmmaker begins to grow.

Pierre, widowed and retired, has not been out of his house for two years. He discovers the joys of the internet thanks to Alex, a young man hired by his daughter to teach him the basics of computer science. On a meeting place, a charming young woman, Flora63, seduced by the romanticism of Pierre, offers her a first date. Lovers, Pierre is back. But on his profile he put a picture of Alex and not his own. Pierre must convince the young man to meet Flora in his place

Hua, a young woman from Beijing, is a recent arrival in Paris. Exiled in an unknown city, she wanders between her tiny apartment and the university, drifting between former lovers and recent French acquaintances. She meets Matthieu, a young worker who falls madly in love with her. Possessed by an insatiable desire for her body, he treats Hua like a dog. An intense affair begins, marked by Matthieu’s passionate embraces and harsh verbal abuse. When Hua determines to leave her lover, she discovers the strength of her addiction, and the vital role he has come to play in her life as a woman.

The story revolves around Alain, a busy businessman who is always in a rush. In his life, there is no room for spare time or family. But one day, he suffers a stroke, which makes him lose his grasp of language and use one word in place of another.

Ariane, a young French violinist, accepts the marriage proposal of Christen, an irresistible conductor. Only problem: she's a little bit ... married! Separated for two years with Nino, an Italian teacher with a strong character, she manages to convince him to follow her to Paris to divorce in 8 days flat. But their trip in the city of love looks much more eventful than expected...

Oppressed by her family setting, dead-end school prospects and the boys law in the neighborhood, Marieme starts a new life after meeting a group of three free-spirited girls. She changes her name, her dress code, and quits school to be accepted in the gang, hoping that this will be a way to freedom.

With only 12 percent of its pupils obtaining their baccalaureate, Jules Ferry High School is the worst school in France. The Inspector of Schools has already exhausted all the conventional means to raise standards at the school and he has no choice but to take the advice of his deputy. It is a case of having to fight fire with fire: the worst pupils must be taught by the worst teachers...

After marrying a successful Parisian writer known commonly as Willy, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is transplanted from her childhood home in rural France to the intellectual and artistic splendor of Paris. Soon after, Willy convinces Colette to ghostwrite for him. She pens a semi-autobiographical novel about a witty and brazen country girl named Claudine, sparking a bestseller and a cultural sensation. After its success, Colette and Willy become the talk of Paris and their adventures inspire additional Claudine novels.

During the last forty years, the photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever changing humanity. He has witnessed the major events of our recent history ; international conflicts, starvations and exodus… He is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, of the wild fauna and flora, of grandiose landscapes : a huge photographic project which is a tribute to the planet's beauty. Sebastião's Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last journeys, and by Wim Wenders, a photographer himself.

The story of a friendship between Victor, owner of a magazine, and Bruno, a car thief.

Willy and Tony have a brilliant idea for getting out of it financially: stealing a dog from the brigade des stups. But everything does not go as planned and the two accomplices will have to rely on the most corrupt of the cops.

There is something strange - some would even say abnormal - about the Malaussène family. But if you take a closer look, no one could be happier than this cheerfully chaotic family, even though their mother is usually off on one romantic adventure or another. Life is never a bore for Benjamin Malaussène, professional scapegoat and the older brother responsible for this horde of kids. But when incidents happen wherever he goes, police and colleagues begin to eye him suspiciously. It soon becomes a matter of life and death to find out what is going on and who is so interested in ruining his life. Written by Pathe International

During the making of one of his films, French film director Jean-Luc Godard falls in love with 17-year old actress Anne Wiazemsky and later gets married.

He invents puzzles. He’s committed body and soul to his work and needs silence to be able to concentrate. She is an accomplished pianist and can’t live without music. She must prepare for a competition that could change her life. They are going to be forced to coexist without seeing each other.

Eddie, Dov, Yvan and the others ... Our warm friends have migrated from the moribund Sentier to the flourishing suburb of Aubervilliers ... Where the old Jewish entrepreneurs left the ground to young courageous and dynamic Chinese wholesalers ... The little band is as close to each other as in previous episodes, and life goes on at the mercy of small family events and business. Dov still seems frivolous, enterprising Eddie, chilled Yvan, casual Karine, resolute Sandra, naive Chochana, irresponsible Serge and mythomaniac. As for Patrick, he is in love and the happy elected is far from easy to access. Everything would be fine until a bad wind brings its share of adversity seriously compromising the cohesion of the group. Will they succumb under the storm to the turmoil, or, once again, by mutual aid, cunning and skill, will they triumph over the crisis with panache?

Mathias Gold is a down-on-his-luck New Yorker who inherits a Parisian apartment from his estranged father. But when he arrives in France to sell the vast domicile, he's shocked to discover a live-in tenant who is not prepared to budge. His apartment is a viager—an ancient French real estate system with complex rules pertaining to its resale—and the feisty Englishwoman Mathilde Girard, who has lived in the apartment with her daughter Chloé for many years, can by contract collect monthly payments from Mathias until her death.

An average guy who works in a recycling plant wakes up one morning to discover that he's become inexplicably famous.

After a serious sport accident in a swimming pool, Ben, now an incomplete quadriplegic, arrives in a rehabilitation center. He meets with other handicapped persons (tetraplegics, paraplegics, traumatized crania), all victims of accidents, as well as a handicapped since his early childhood. They go through impotence, despair and resignation, with their daily struggle to learn how to move a finger or to hold a fork. Some of them slowly find a little mobility while others receive the verdict of the handicap for life. Despite everything, hope and friendship help them endure their difficulties.

A union pensioner and his wife are robbed, but find that merely getting the assailants brought to justice is not enough for their consciences.

An Algerian man's life-long dream finally comes true when he receives an invitation to take his cow Jacqueline to the Paris International Agriculture Fair.

Set in the 1920s French Riviera, a master magician is commissioned to try and expose a psychic as a fraud.

„Un peuple et son roi" crosses the destinies of the men and women of the population, and those of historical figures. Their meeting place is the newly founded National Assembly. At the heart of the story lie the fate of the king and the birth of the French Republic.

Kahina Zadi, 32, a French police officer travels to Kiruna in Sweden to investigate the bestial murder of a French citizen. Together with Anders, a Swedish prosecutor of Sami origin, she begins an investigation. Soon new killings start to happen and the first victim turns out to be the tip of a very dark iceberg. The victims seemingly have nothing in common more than that they are all being killed in a well-planned and vicious manner. In their hunt for the truth, both Kahina and Anders are forced to deal with their own past that they have repressed. A personal journey through a painful past becomes the key to succeed in preventing the violent killings that affects the small mining community of Kiruna.

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), man of the people, autodidact and revolutionary sculptor - the most brilliant of his era. At 42, Rodin meets Camille Claudel, a young woman desperate to become his assistant. He quickly acknowledges her as his most able pupil, and treats her as an equal in matters of creation.

Alice, a perfect wife and mother who lives happily with her husband and child until the day she discovers her husband is living a double life that has ruined her financially and left her a single mother. Alice fights back and dives into a world beyond anything she has ever known.

October 1941. Eighteen months into France’s occupation by German troops, young Communist members of the Resistance shoot dead an officer of the German Army. In retaliation, Hitler demands the deaths of 150 Frenchmen, as 'retribution'. The targets are to be mostly young men believed to share the assassins’ political convictions. Most of these men are taken from an internment camp for opponents of the occupation; a 35-year-old French rural administrator is ordered to select the victims. Although the parish priest appeals to their conscience and moral sensibilities, both the German military and their French helpers slavishly follow their orders.

When 43-year-old hairdresser Suze Trappet finds out that she's seriously ill, she decides to go looking for a child she was forced to abandon when she was only 15. On her madcap bureaucratic quest she crosses paths with JB, a 50-year-old man in the middle of a burnout, and Mr. Blin, a blind archivist prone to overenthusiasm. The unlikely trio set off on a hilarious and poignant helterskelter journey across the city in search of Suze's long-lost child.

The film centres on a retired, widowed professor living in Paris who develops a special relationship with a younger French woman.

A hitman named Tul is shot in the head during an assignment. When he wakes up from a two month coma Tul discovers that he literally sees everything upside down.

A thrilling mystery that unfurls in the alleys and on the rooftops of the French capital, Paris, over the course of one adventurous evening.

Ruben, Durex and Nora are three students in their last year of college. Ruben has already failed his exams once due to his lack of self-confidence. He's been as useless with Nora, to whom he dares not confess his feelings. And his childhood friend Durex, the most embarrassing guy in the world, is no help at all. When Ruben discovers that Nora is a dealer and that she's going to Amsterdam to bring back a new kind of drug, Ruben bucks up the courage to accompany her. This trip to Amsterdam is an ideal situation in which to at last seduce Nora. But his bad luck: Durex comes along for the ride. While the trio discover Europe's craziest capital, their lives really get complicated when they realize that the drug they've just picked up belongs to one of Amsterdam's most dangerous gangsters. Very quickly, Ruben, Durex and Nora will understand that to get their old lives back, they must stop being nerds in order to become true heroes.

The story of the final seven months in the life of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

Franck and Simon are both good cops. They work as partners. But their lives take a tailspin when Simon, driving drunk, causes a tragic car wreck. A few years later, out of the police, he is forced to take matters into his own hands when his family is in danger.

In a ghetto where religion and drug trafficking rub shoulders, Dounia has a lust for power and success. Supported by Maimouna, her best friend, she decides to follow in the footsteps of Rebecca, a respected dealer. But her encounter with Djigui, a young, disturbingly sensual dancer, throws her off course.

A look at French president Nicolas Sarkozy's rise to power.

Three characters living in an unfinished painting venture out into the real world in search of their creator to convince him to finish his work.

Éric and Patrice have been friends since high school. Over the years, they have both taken very different paths: Éric has become a hedonist, has a string of girlfriends and is always on the look out for a new one; Patrice has become a monogamous father with a very ordered life. After a drunken evening, the two childhood friends find themselves cast back into 1986, when they were 17 years old. This return to the past is a dream opportunity to try to change the path their lives will take. What will they do with this second chance?

Sasha and Ilya, a bored young couple on a verge of breakup, are spending a New Year's Eve at a secluded beach house in Northern France then a carcass of an unidentified creature is washed ashore nearby. Later that day on his way back from a local bar Ilya meets Masha, a lost Russian girl, who seems to have gotten off the train at the wrong station and has nowhere to spend the night.

Louise, a widow with two children, almost crushes a stranger with her car. She takes care of him, even if he's not really wounded. It turns out that he has mental disorders and that they can help each other much more than they thought.

Asterix crosses the channel to help second-cousin Anticlimax face down Julius Caesar and invading Romans.