How relevant is French cinema?

For months now, the media has endlessly debated the artistic merits—or, for some, the unforgivable excesses—of Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, an extravagant musical narco-novela set in Mexico (though largely filmed on a French soundstage). Regardless of your opinion on the film, it’s at least more compelling than anything that could be said about Marvel’s latest installment, Captain America: Brave New World. Fortunately, other noteworthy contributions are expanding the conversation around contemporary French cinema, thanks to the 29th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, organized by Film at Lincoln Center in collaboration with Unifrance. These four films in this year’s lineup serve as prime examples of the range and originality that French filmmakers continue to bring.

One of the festival’s U.S. premieres is the electrifying And Their Children After Them, a coming-of-age story that, in the hands of writer-director brothers Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma, becomes a saga deepening as its characters grow and mature over a decade.

Based on Nicolas Mathieu’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel, the story follows two teenagers and their intertwined families over several years. Set in a small, deindustrialized French town across four summers between 1992 and 1999, Anthony (Paul Kircher) and Hacine (Sayyid El Alami) navigate typical adolescent anxieties, compounded by the limited prospects of their environment. Anthony is a bored, carefree White slacker, the son of working-class parents (Gilles Lellouche and Ludivine Sagnier). Hacine, the son of Moroccan immigrants, lives in a housing project with his strict father (Lounès Tazairt). Neither seems destined for a bright future, though Hacine cannot afford the same carefree immaturity that Anthony enjoys. The constant awareness of his disadvantages weighs on him, shaping him over the years into someone increasingly resentful and prone to violence.

For Anthony, his primary longing is an unspoken, mostly unrequited love for middle-class Stéphanie (Angelina Woreth), who aspires to attend university and is, by all measures, out of his league. His fixation on her provides the surface-level narrative engine, but the deeper emotional core lies in his volatile relationship with his alcoholic father, Patrick, and his escalating enmity with Hacine after a fight at a party leads to years of retaliatory violence.

What begins as a familiar, if entertaining, teen angst romance—set to an overly curated jukebox soundtrack—gradually hints at a starker reality: frustrated lives with no real opportunities to dream. The film’s social critique, reflected in the young men’s evolution, occasionally feels a bit on the nose and at times inconsistent (a subplot involving Hacine as a drug dealer fizzles out). Still, the raw energy of the performances engages, with Lellouche delivering a particularly moving turn in a devastating moment. And Their Children After Them ultimately plays as an ironic epic—seducing viewers with familiar coming-of-age tropes while simultaneously undercutting the illusion of youth as a golden dream.

Continuing the theme of intense family drama, the festival also presents The Quiet Son, another literary adaptation from sibling filmmakers—this time sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin (The Stopover), based on Laurent Petitmangin’s novel What You Need from the Night. Vincent Lindon won the Volpi Cup at last year’s Venice Film Festival for his role as a grieving working-class father and widower trying to hold his family of three together.

At first, introverted and studious Louis (Stefan Crepon), with his potential shot at La Sorbonne, appears like the titular “quiet son.” But the original French title, Le Joueur de Flûte (literally The Pied Piper), points toward the film’s real focus: Fus (Benjamin Voisin), the eldest, who falls in with far-right youth gangs. For Pierre (Lindon), there’s mounting frustration and shock as he tries to pinpoint when his once-stable family began to fall apart. Lindon’s seasoned performance expresses the contradictory emotions of a father watching his beloved son drift into extremism.

Fus doesn’t initially seem like a “bad kid.” He’s introduced as a star athlete with a magnetic, charismatic presence that his father and brother admire. Pierre is the provider, Louis is the promising one, but Fus is the fire that keeps the household alive. With no clear ambitions, Fus eventually finds belonging in a dangerous new crowd, repeating anti-immigrant rhetoric. Tensions at the dinner table quickly escalate into full-blown confrontations, and his involvement in protests and vandalism sets him on an irreversible path. Pierre sees the inevitable unfolding, but his rigid, authoritarian response may only hasten the tragedy.

The Quiet Son lays bare how ideological and social pressures can fracture families overnight without heavy-handedness. By centering on character over message, it allows the political dimensions to emerge organically and with nuance.

Occupying that delicate intersection of the political and the personal, Souleymane’s Story stands out as a model of how to portray social issues through fully realized characters. Directed by Boris Lojkine and co-written with Delphine Guil, it offers a precise, empathetic portrait of contemporary migrant life in Paris.

Over three tense days leading up to his asylum interview, Souleymane (Abou Sangaré), a recent immigrant from Guinea, works illegally as a food delivery driver. When the app requires facial verification, he scrambles to find the friend whose identity he’s been borrowing, leaving him vulnerable to exploitation and constant risk. One delivery even lands him in the middle of a police gathering, where officers question him after noticing his photo doesn’t match the app’s profile.

Souleymane’s daily survival is a gauntlet: calling each morning to secure a bed at a shelter, timing his work shifts to catch the last bus, and rehearsing a fabricated story—crafted by paid advisers—for his asylum claim. Every system seems designed to grind him down, yet he keeps moving forward because there’s no other option.

There are brief glimpses into Souleymane’s inner world—a video call with an ex-girlfriend announcing her engagement, for instance—but his exhausted face becomes a vessel for understanding the migrant experience. Lojkine’s film aligns with the socially conscious tradition perfected by the Dardenne brothers—who might envy not having made this one themselves. Yet Souleymane’s Story resists tidy closure. It leaves us with only the faintest glimmer of hope: The idea that behind every social issue lies a person with a story worth hearing.

Finally, no French film festival would be complete without a bit of conceptual extravagance, and Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act more than fits the bill. From the outset, the film announces its meta-cinematic ambitions, constantly breaking the fourth wall.

The premise is simple: four people are on their way to a diner. David (Louis Garrel) and Willy (Raphaël Quenard) plot to have Willy seduce David’s possessive girlfriend, Florence (Léa Seydoux), so David can break up with her. Their banter veers into intentionally provocative territory, parodying conversations about identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture.

Meanwhile, Florence is eager to introduce David to her father, Guillaume (Vincent Lindon), who promptly disrupts the scene by declaring himself an actor in crisis, questioning whether he even wants to continue. The characters are simultaneously fictional and hyper-aware of their roles in what is revealed to be the first film written and directed by artificial intelligence.

As the night unfolds, The Second Act becomes a melancholy reflection on the future of cinema itself. The actors bicker over roles in a hypothetical Paul Thomas Anderson project (described as “the best director right now,” since Scorsese is “too old”) and trade barbs about Tarantino. AI occasionally interrupts, issuing directives and and reminding the ensemble that it has no interest in their opinions or emotions.

Premiering as the opening night selection at last year’s Cannes Film Festival—a heavily scrutinized slot—The Second Act was met with mixed reviews. But freed from those intense pressures, Dupieux’s satire reveals unexpected depths. Its characters have short-lived existences, the onscreen actors struggle to resume their lives once the spotlight fades, and there is no longer a guarantee that the art form of cinema as we know it will prevail. It all coalesces into something surprisingly poignant.