The best Francis Renaud’s drama movies

Caught in the crosshairs of police corruption and Marseille’s warring gangs, a loyal cop must protect his squad by taking matters into his own hands.

After growing up in a poor gypsy camp, Edmond Vidal, aka Momon, has retained a sense of family, unfailing loyalty and pride in his origins. Most of all, he has remained friends with Serge Suttel, with whom he first discovered prison life - for stealing cherries. The two of them inevitably got involved in organized crime. The team they formed, the Ganf Des Lyonnais, made them the most notorious armed robbers of the early 1970s. Their irresistible rise ended in 1974 with a spectacular arrest. Today, as he nears 60, Momon would like to forget that part of his life. He has found peace by retiring from the "business". He tends to his wife Janou, who suffered so in the past, and to his children and grandchildren, all of whom have great respect for this man of simple and universal values, so clear-headed and full of kindness. But then Serge Suttel, who has disowned nothing of his past, comes back into the picture.

The film takes place in Paris, where two cops are competing for the vacant seat of chief of police while in the middle of a search for a gang of violent thieves. The movie is directed by Olivier Marchal, a former police officer who spent 12 years with the French police before creating this story, which is taken in part from real facts that happened during the 1980s in France.

A washed-up Marseilles cop (Auteuil) earns a chance at redemption by protecting a woman from the man who killed her parents as he is about to be released from prison.

Daniel is a former police officer turned debt collector. Now in his late fifties, he goes about his "dirty job" without emotion or sympathy. One winter's day, he stops at a roadside parking lot and is approached by Laura, an 18-year-old young woman who asks him to drive her home. He accepts, and on the way, she offers him "her services" in exchange for money. Daniel is furious, and throws her out of his car. But his feelings of remorse and the violence of his reaction lead him to turn around and retrace his steps, only to discover that Laura has disappeared...

Franck Chaievski and Nina Delgado are two undercover detectives of a French special force trying to identify two corrupts members of the Paris Police Force. Franck is pretending to be a gangster and Nina a prostitute living with him, and involved in a robbery of a fortune in diamonds, having seven deaths and some injured persons.

Hélène, a housekeeper at a ritzy hotel in Corsica, is devoted to her family but lacks any passion in her own life. When she sees a handsome couple play a passionate game of chess, she becomes inspired to play herself. Hélène's working-class husband and spoiled daughter are soon bewildered by her obsession with chess. They also grow suspicious of Hélène's close relationship with Dr. Kröger, her eccentric American expat tutor.

A teenage girl helps investigators reconstruct her mother's (Isabelle Renauld) murder.

Dris is an ex-con, living in the borderline between a decent and a criminal life. He has a regular and simple work and lives a simple life with his wife Lise and loves his family. However, his childhood friends from his Arab community, including his best friend Yanis, are mobsters and his brother is a small time delinquent. Yanis tries to bring Dris back to his gang, and uses his former lover Nina to seduce him, taking him to expensive places to feel the importance of big money. Dris fights against the temptation, but an event will route him back to Yanis' gang and in a fight between gangs with tragic consequences for the whole community.

An anonymous hacker has hacked all of Paris' cameras and observes the city unbeknownst to its inhabitants. Petty crimes and moments of stolen intimacy, he sees everything. Until the day that an explosion lays wasted to the Gare d'Austerlitz. The police starts tracking down an Al Queda satellite group. The hacker succeeds in finding images of the explosion and discovers that it was a young couple who planted the bomb. Using the city's cameras, he decides to hunt down the criminals.

Newly promoted Lieutenant Valentine Ventura finds herself working with famous Captain Antoine Thomas who just came back from his medical leave after the tragedy he lived a few months ago : victim of a car crash that killed both his wife and the child she was bearing, Antoine Thomas spent several months in the hospital, and is now back in a wheelchair after losing function of his legs. Working on the case of a murdered young journalist, the two detectives succeed in arresting her colleague, whose guilt is undeniable. Multiple elements even indicate that they just caught a serial killer; although he admits he killed the young journalist, their suspect didn't commit these other murders, and seems to be the victim of a manipulation.

A charred body is found in Brocéliande Forest with a shocked and speechless 13-year-old boy next to it. What is he doing there? How is he involved? Two gendarmes and an unconventional child psychiatrist try to clear up the mystery.

Jean-Pierre and his wife Blanche live a quiet but happy life in their small Belgian town. But their world is shattered when their young son goes missing. In the aftermath of the family tragedy, the couple's own relationship starts to deteriorate. As it gets worse, Blanche begins to lose touch with reality, believing that their son is still with them. Now Jean-Pierre must decide whether to let Blanche believe her fantasy, or bring her around to the horrible truth.

For years, Axel has cut off ties with his family, devastated by a tragedy for which he was made to bear responsibility. When the freighter on which he was cook stopped in his hometown, he decided to visit his mother, Françoise. It's a shock: she no longer recognizes him. Having Alzheimer's disease, Françoise now forgets whole sections of her life. Axel is the first of the siblings to disappear from his memory. Why him? What is he hiding behind this oversight? And while Ivan and Lucie have agreed to have her admitted in the center, Axel opposes it frontally and delays her departure to take care of her, despite the tensions. Between the mother and the son opens the face-to-face so long feared and yet necessary.

Coming-of-age drama telling the story of the strong bond between Xavier and his little brother Jacques and their struggle to remain together despite all odds. Over the course of a summer vacation, both brothers struggle with the harsh reality that Jacques will be sent to a school for children with special needs when a new term begins.