‘De Gaulle: Résistance’ Review: Antonin Baudry’s Large-Scale Epic is a Conventional yet Consistently Engaging Wartime Biopic

May 25, 2026 12:25am PT ‘De Gaulle: Résistance’ Review: Antonin Baudry’s Large-Scale Epic is a Conventional yet Consistently Engaging Wartime Biopic

Simon Abkarian is convincing as the patriotic De Gaulle with his iconic kepi, dynamically mining the heart of the French General’s relationship with Winston Churchill, in a film reminiscent of a vintage Hollywood blockbuster.

By Tomris Laffly

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Tomris Laffly

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Every Cannes Film Festival needs a film like “De Gaulle: Résistance,” a proudly French and massively scaled production with the energy of a vintage Hollywood blockbuster. Indeed, Antonin Baudry’s old-fashioned epic flaunts all these big-screen qualities in delicious excess, dispensing a traditionally entertaining biopic on France’s eponymous Great Man and his consequential years in the early 1940s as an exiled general with a romantic vision of his country that has just capitulated to Germany.

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