America’s love story with France and things French can be a stormy affair – remember the redneck rage a few years back at the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"? But Hollywood’s vision of France and Frenchness, often of actual Americans in Paris, can be a gloriously heady experience.

Before Sunrise/ Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 1995/2004)

A magnificent, delightful, moving pair of films about the power, vicissitudes and uncertainties of love, made nine years apart with the same actors (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy). This spontaneous-feeling pair of movies, the latter a masterpiece, constitutes what Linklater calls "romance for realists": his characters find themselves forced to decide – in the city of lovers – whether one’s life should be ruled by deep intuitions.

Killing Zoe (Roger Avary, 1993)

Avary has had a chequered career since co-writing Pulp Fiction to say the least (he’s now in jail for manslaughter through drunk driving), but while unpleasant and unsettling in subject matter and full of sex, drugs and violence, and critically dismissed, his story of a hippyish American criminal called Zed (Eric Stoltz) joining old friends for a bank job in Paris only to find too late they’re drug-crazed murderous losers wins passionate admirers.