Collections/August 2026

Directed by Julien Duvivier

Julien Duvivier was among the definitive craftsmen of classical French cinema, bringing expressive camera work, atmospheric mise-en-scène, and a darkly lyrical sensibility to often-overlooked jewels across an extraordinary array of genres. His deeply shadowed, fatalistic early sound films David Golder and La tête d’un homme anticipate the poetic-realist style that would come to define 1930s Gallic cinema, and which would find one of its fullest expressions in the intoxicatingly doom-laden, Algiers-set underworld drama Pépé le Moko . From the elegant, wistful romance of Un carnet de bal to the startlingly bleak noir pessimism of Panique to the charmingly imaginative meta-comedy of La fête à Henriette , Duvivier maintained a master’s touch that won him the admiration of titans like Orson Welles and Jean Renoir, who declared, “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier at the entrance.”

11 films

Still watchable end to end.