Streaming: the best of My French Film Festival

Now in its 10th edition, the online My French Film Festival has become a comforting January tradition. At a time of year when we seem to have been poring over the same handful of awards contenders for weeks, and studios are otherwise unloading some iffy-looking commercial leftovers into cinemas, this festival tends to offer arthouse viewers a bracing selection of interesting, previously unreleased films that haven’t been discussed to death.

Having kicked off last Thursday, and set to run until 16 February, this year’s selection includes 12 feature films and 19 shorts, available to stream on a wider selection of partner platforms than before. Amazon Prime, Chili, Curzon Home Cinema and the library-based service Kanopy are among the options, as now is the Apple TV app. Mubi subscribers will find some festival titles folded into their menus, while films can also be viewed via the festival’s own website. All the short films are free to view. While some territories also get free access to the feature-length ones, UK viewers must pay either the equivalent of €2 per film, or €8 for access to the lot.

There’s enough good stuff here to justify the moderate investment. Perhaps the pick of the bunch is School’s Out, a nifty, unnerving psychodrama from director Sébastien Marnier, which doesn’t fit snugly into any genre box. There are clear flashes of inspiration from Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Laurent Cantet’s The Class here, with a cold twist of Children of the Damned-style horror. Laurent Lafitte (whom you may remember from Paul Verhoeven’s Elle) carries it strappingly as a supply teacher assigned to a class of gifted teens in the wake of his predecessor’s suicide, only to find an eerie, isolating dynamic among them.

Also on the offbeat genre side is Jonathan Vinel and Caroline Poggi’s festival-circuit hit Jessica Forever, which plays like an eccentric, ultraviolent variation on dystopian young-adult fiction, with Aomi Muyock as its commanding, taciturn heroine: a kind of orphaned punk warrior, protecting a band of fellow young, militarised lone wolves from the government’s clutches in near-futuristic France. It’s half silly and half giddily exhilarating, with directorial style to burn, using minimal visual effects to build a disorienting world of desolated suburbia and swarming drone armies.

Still, it’s not quite as trippy and elliptical as To the Ends of the World – also popping up on Mubi later this month – a sort of small-scale Indochina Apocalypse Now from the reliably singular auteur Guillaume Nicloux. Starring Gaspard Ulliel as a French soldier astray in the jungle, seeking his regiment after surviving a grisly massacre, it serves a heady pileup of war-is-hell imagery as viscerally nightmarish as it is exquisitely shot.

There’s more wholesome beauty in The Swallows of Kabul, based on the bestselling novel by Yasmina Khadra. The film, warmly received at Cannes last year, is a richly animated portrait of everyday life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan circa 1998. It follows the travails of two couples battling oppression and imprisonment, and is historically resonant and tough-minded in ways not overly softened by its lovely watercolour-style visuals in desert pastels.

With the Wind, meanwhile, is a stirring, questioning drama from Swiss director Bettina Oberli that probes the challenges of ecological living, with a compelling dash of romantic melodrama. Playing like a less black-edged Woman at War, it’s superbly anchored by Mélanie Thierry as an organic farmer who finds her environment easier to control than her emotions.

Finally, soulful, subtitle-friendly adolescent viewers might find Meteorites to their taste. A straightforward but affecting coming-of-age story following a frustrated 16-year-old girl’s sexual awakening in the parched mountains of the Occitanie region, its toasty, blush-coloured evocation of France’s summery south couldn’t be more welcome in the bleak midwinter.

New to streaming and DVD

Bait
(BFI, 15)
The microbudget Cornish wonder – our own Mark Kermode’s favourite film of 2019 – makes it to Blu-ray. Its textured, fascinatingly mannered fusion of old-school Brit realism and bristlingly contemporary class politics plays just as well on a small screen.

The Goldfinch
(Warner Bros, 15)
Mauled by critics and left for dead early in the awards race, John Crowley’s attempt to contain Donna Tartt’s sprawling bestseller on screen isn’t as disastrous as its reputation. Stifled and a little stiff, yes, but a handsome saga for a rainy day.

The Operative
(Signature, 15)
Skipping cinemas after premiering in Berlin last year, Yuval Adler’s diverting espionage thriller stars a committed Diane Kruger as a Mossad agent gone rogue. Rather like a good spy, it does its job efficiently without standing out from the crowd.

The Cakemaker
(Peccadillo, 15)
Ofir Raul Graizer’s gentle arthouse crowdpleaser will find a devoted DVD audience. The story of a gay German patissier and a Jerusalem widow grieving for the same lover, it has a soft, warm baker’s touch.