Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items25
1
Mon oncle Antoine (1971)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
The starting point. Claude Jutra sets it in a small asbestos-mining town on Christmas Eve, seen through a teenage boy who helps out at his uncle's general store, which doubles as the undertaker's. A quarrel with an English-speaking foreman at the mine tells you everything about who held power in old Quebec without a single speech.
What makes it last is the tone: funny, sly and sad within the same scene, and never sentimental about rural life. It topped TIFF's polls of the greatest Canadian films in 1984, 1993 and 2004, and it still plays like a coming-of-age story first and a history lesson second.
More about Mon oncle Antoine2
Orders (1974)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
Les Ordres
During the October Crisis of 1970, martial law came to Quebec and ordinary people were jailed for weeks without charge. Michel Brault, one of the great documentary cameramen, tells their story as a docudrama, switching between color and black and white so you stop being sure where reenactment ends and testimony begins.
It is quiet, procedural and furious underneath, and it won Brault the best director prize at Cannes, which no other Canadian has managed. Watch it if you want to understand why the word "ordres" still lands hard in Quebec.
More about Orders3
Good Riddance (1980)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Les Bons Débarras
A 13-year-old girl in an isolated corner of rural Quebec wants her mother entirely to herself, and she will wreck anything that gets in the way. Charlotte Laurier plays Manon with a cold, clever stare that makes her both frightening and heartbreaking, opposite Marie Tifo as the worn-out mother running a small firewood business.
The script is by the novelist Réjean Ducharme, and you can hear it in the dialogue, which is blunt, poetic and very Québécois. Of all the family dramas here, this one has the sharpest teeth, and it won eight Genie Awards, including best film.
More about Good Riddance4
The Dog Who Stopped the War (1984)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
La Guerre des tuques
Ask almost anyone who grew up in Quebec about this one. Two gangs of village kids spend their winter break fighting a war game armed with snowballs, shields and wooden swords, with an extraordinary ice fortress as the prize, and the game slowly gets more serious than any of them meant it to.
André Melançon directs the children so naturally that the rivalries, crushes and wounded pride all feel real, and the ending lands harder than you expect from a family film. It was the first of Rock Demers's Tales for All series and earned the Golden Reel for the highest domestic box office of its year. The one to watch with kids, or to understand a whole generation's nostalgia.
More about The Dog Who Stopped the War5
The Decline of the American Empire (1986)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Le Déclin de l'empire américain
Four Montreal university teachers gather at a rambling country house to cook dinner, and the conversation turns quickly to sex, affairs and getting older.
Denys Arcand's comedy is almost all talk, and the talk is the pleasure: smart, vain, very funny people saying more than they should. It took the critics' prize at Cannes and best picture at the Genies, and it starts the cast's story that continues in The Barbarian Invasions, so watch this one first.
More about The Decline of the American Empire6
Jesus of Montreal (1989)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
Jésus de Montréal
A troupe of actors puts on a fresh, interpretive Passion play in Montreal, and their version is so alive that the Catholic Church starts to push back. As the production grows, the actors find their roles leaking into their private lives.
Arcand uses the setup to needle the commercial culture around his characters while still taking faith seriously. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes and an Oscar nomination, and it is the best proof that his satire has a heart.
More about Jesus of Montreal7
Léolo (1992)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
A 12-year-old in working-class Montreal decides he cannot possibly belong to his family and invents a far more exotic origin involving a Sicilian tomato. Jean-Claude Lauzon turns that fantasy into a surreal, half-autobiographical film that is by turns grotesque, lyrical and painfully funny.
It is not an easy watch, and some scenes are deliberately repellent, but nothing else on this list looks or sounds like it. Time named it one of the ten best films of 1993. Lauzon died in a plane crash in 1997, so this was his last feature.
More about Léolo8
The Barbarian Invasions (2003)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
Les Invasions barbares
Rémy, one of the professors from The Decline of the American Empire, is dying of cancer, and his ex-wife calls their estranged son, a successful businessman in London, home to help. Old friends and old lovers gather around him.
It is a comedy about death that earns its tears, with the same wicked dinner-table talk now edged with regret. It won the Oscar for best foreign language film, plus best screenplay and an acting prize for Marie-Josée Croze at Cannes. You can watch it cold, but it hits harder after the first film.
More about The Barbarian Invasions9
Seducing Doctor Lewis (2003)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
La Grande Séduction
A struggling fishing village can land a factory only if it has a full-time doctor, so when a Montreal physician is pressured into spending a month there, the whole town sets out to convince him he has found paradise.
This is the warmest crowd-pleaser on the list, and its deadpan small-town humor travels well. It was a huge hit in Quebec and won an audience award at Sundance. The schemes get more elaborate and more ridiculous as the month runs out, and the cast plays every one of them with a straight face.
More about Seducing Doctor Lewis10
C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
If you see one film from this list, make it this one. Zach is the second-youngest of five brothers in a Montreal family during the Quiet Revolution, the 1960s and 1970s break with church-run Quebec, and he is gay in a house where his father's approval is everything.
Jean-Marc Vallée tells it with huge energy and a soundtrack of Bowie, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones that mattered so much he deferred about $600,000 of his own fees to help pay for the music rights. It won 10 Genie Awards and was the top-grossing Canadian film of its year, but the father-son story is the reason it lasts.
More about C.R.A.Z.Y.11
Polytechnique (2009)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
The hardest watch on this list, and one of the most important. Denis Villeneuve dramatizes the December 6, 1989 massacre at Montreal's École Polytechnique, where a gunman killed fourteen women, and he shoots it in black and white with a restraint that keeps the focus on the students rather than the killer.
The idea for the film came from Karine Vanasse, who also plays a surviving student and carries its aftermath. It won best motion picture at the 2010 Genie Awards along with a string of other Genies. Watch it when you are ready for something sober and unflinching, not as a night's entertainment.
More about Polytechnique12
I Killed My Mother (2009)
7.4/10on IMDb
Released
J'ai tué ma mère
Xavier Dolan wrote the script at 17, then directed and starred in it as Hubert, a brash teenager caught in a love-hate war with his mother that consumes more of him every day.
The fights are funny until suddenly they are not, and Dolan's showy, music-driven style arrives fully formed. It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and won three prizes there, including one for its screenplay. Pair it with Mommy, which pushes the same mother-son battle much further.
More about I Killed My Mother13
Incendies (2010)
8.3/10on IMDb
Released
Before Dune, Denis Villeneuve made this in French, and it is still the film of his that hits hardest. After their mother's death, adult twins are handed two letters with her last wishes, which send them to an unnamed Middle Eastern country to find out who she really was.
Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's play, it moves between the twins' search and the mother's past, and Lubna Azabal is extraordinary in that role. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film. Go in knowing as little as possible.
More about Incendies14
Monsieur Lazhar (2011)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
A Montreal grade-school class loses its teacher to suicide, and the substitute who turns up is Bachir Lazhar, an Algerian immigrant carrying a grief of his own that nobody at school knows about. The children are sharper about what happened than the adults want to admit.
Philippe Falardeau adapts Évelyne de la Chenelière's play with real restraint, and Fellag gives a gentle, quietly funny performance that holds it together. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film and won the audience prize at Locarno. It is a sad film that leaves you feeling better.
More about Monsieur Lazhar15
Starbuck (2011)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
David Wozniak, a forty-something slacker played by Patrick Huard, learns that the sperm he donated two decades ago fathered 533 children, and 142 of them are suing to learn who he is. So he starts secretly dropping in on their lives.
It is the lightest film here and a perfect first Quebec comedy: Ken Scott's premise is absurd, but the jokes come from Huard's hangdog charm and the very ordinary Montreal around him. It was remade in Hollywood two years later as Delivery Man, and the original is warmer and quicker.
More about Starbuck16
Mommy (2014)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Anne Dorval plays a widowed single mother struggling to raise a teenage son who is funny, unpredictable and sometimes violent, and a peculiar neighbor becomes the third point of a fragile triangle.
Dolan shoots most of it in a cramped square frame that widens to full screen only in a few moments of freedom, and the effect is a genuine gasp. The dialogue is loud, fast and full of Québécois slang, so keep the subtitles on. It shared the Jury Prize at Cannes with Jean-Luc Godard, and it is Dolan at his most exhausting and his most moving.
More about Mommy17
Ravenous (2017)
5.8/10on IMDb
Released
Les Affamés
A zombie movie, but a very Quebec one: a handful of survivors in the farm country and forests of rural Quebec, trading dry jokes while the infected go about their strange, compulsive rituals. Robin Aubert cares more about the uneasy stillness of those landscapes than about jump scares.
The mix of gallows humor, surreal images and real dread is what sets it apart from the usual undead fare, and it won best Canadian feature at TIFF. Choose it if you like your horror slow and odd rather than loud.
More about Ravenous18
Family First (2018)
6.9/10on IMDb
Released
Chien de garde
JP shares a cramped apartment in Montreal's Verdun district with his mother, his girlfriend and his impulsive, volatile brother Vincent, and he works for the drug operation his uncle runs. Every day he tries to keep all of them from blowing up.
Sophie Dupuis's debut is a family drama with a crime story wrapped around it, and Théodore Pellerin as Vincent is electric, impossible to look away from and impossible to predict. The street French is rough and fast. It was Canada's Oscar submission, and it is one of the best calling cards for the new generation of Quebec directors.
More about Family First19
Antigone (2019)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
Sophie Deraspe moves Sophocles to present-day Montreal, where Antigone's family arrived as refugees more than a decade ago, and her loyalty to her family sets her against the law and the system that decides who gets to stay.
Nahéma Ricci gives a breakout performance, playing her with a calm stubbornness that makes a play more than 2,000 years old feel like this week's news. It was Canada's Oscar submission and won six Canadian Screen Awards. A good pick for anyone who likes a moral argument with a pulse.
More about Antigone20
A Brother’s Love (2019)
6.7/10on IMDb
Released
La Femme de mon frère
Sophia is brilliant, overeducated and very close to her brother Karim, so close that when he finds a new girlfriend she takes it about as well as you would expect from someone with nowhere else to put her energy.
Monia Chokri's debut as a director is a talky, colorful, very Montreal comedy about the intellectual class and sibling codependence, and it shared the Coup de coeur jury prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. If you enjoy the sharp-tongued Arcand films earlier on this list, this is their younger, funnier cousin.
More about A Brother’s Love21
Falcon Lake (2022)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
Two families share a summer cottage on a lake in Quebec, and a shy boy of nearly 14 falls for the 16-year-old girl who insists the water is haunted by a swimmer who drowned there. The Canadian actor Charlotte Le Bon, making her first feature, adapts Bastien Vivès's graphic novel A Sister into something sweeter and stranger than the usual summer-romance story.
It is more coming-of-age than horror, but the ghost story hangs over every swim and every dare. It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. Sara Montpetit, who plays the girl, also leads Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, so they make a fine double bill.
More about Falcon Lake22
Viking (2022)
6.8/10on IMDb
Released
The crew of the first crewed mission to Mars is at each other's throats, so five ordinary volunteers with matching personalities are recruited to play out the same mission in the desert. Steve Laplante's David takes his part as one of the astronauts very seriously indeed, and the mock tensions soon become real.
Stéphane Lafleur plays it completely straight, and that is why it is so funny and, by the end, oddly touching. It premiered at TIFF in the Platform program. Pick it when you want the dry, absurd side of Quebec comedy.
More about Viking23
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant
The title is the whole pitch. Sasha is a young vampire who is too sensitive to kill, so her exasperated parents cut off her blood supply, and her one hope is Paul, a lonely teenager who is willing to give his life for hers if she helps him tick off a few last wishes before dawn.
Ariane Louis-Seize's debut is a deadpan, tender horror-comedy with a gorgeous nighttime look, and Sara Montpetit plays Sasha's gloom with perfect timing. It won the director's award in the Giornate degli Autori at Venice. The best gateway on this list for anyone under 30.
More about Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person24
The Nature of Love (2023)
6.8/10on IMDb
Released
Simple comme Sylvain
Sophia teaches philosophy in Montreal and has been with the same partner for ten years. Sylvain is the carpenter from the Laurentians hired to renovate their country house. It is love at first sight, and then the class gap starts talking.
Monia Chokri gets a lot of comedy from the clash between Sophia's world of ideas and Sylvain's very different one, and Magalie Lépine-Blondeau and Pierre-Yves Cardinal make the attraction completely believable. It won the César for best foreign film in France, beating Oppenheimer. Pick it for a smart, sexy romantic comedy that does not flinch from the awkward parts.
More about The Nature of Love
