Léon Larive

Highlighted works

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  La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

  Silent cinema at its most sublimely expressive, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece is an austere but hugely affecting dramatisation of the trial of St Joan.

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  La Règle du jeu

  Made on the cusp of WWII, Jean Renoir’s satire of the upper-middle classes was banned as demoralising by the French government for two decades after its release.

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  Les Enfants du paradis

  Made during the Nazi occupation of France, Marcel Carne’s romantic epic of the 19th-century theatre world is a life-affirming tribute to love, Paris and the stage.

• French Cancan

  Renoir’s classic, about an impresario trying to revive the cancan in the Moulin Rouge.