Charles Drazin is a lecturer on cinema at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous books include The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s and In Search of The Third Man. This “canon” of French films is a list not of personal favorites (although some of them are) but of films that I think serve to illustrate some of the key themes of French Cinema. All of them, I hope, bring out the idea that the true importance of the French cinema is the degree to which it inspires and informs our own cinema—“our” meaning specifically the English-speaking cinema.