Games of Love and Chance (2005)

The factors that won Games of Love and Chance France's 2005 César award as Best Picture may not have been entirely cinematic, but they're valid nonetheless. Abdellatif Kechiche's gritty, improvisatory-style drama about teenagers rehearsing a school play is set in a rough Paris housing project; those actors are all project residents, most of them from Muslim families of North African descent. They swear on the Koran, and they also bicker viciously over universal stuff like who's stealing whose boyfriend. The vérité fascinates, even if the artifice is obvious.