Essential Arthouse: La haine (1995)
24 hours in the lives of three young men in the French suburbs the day after a violent riot.
(NR, 97 min.)
Showtimes
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
7:00 PM
Essential Arthouse: This monthly series showcases “essential arthouse” films everyone should see on the big screen. Arthouse is a film genre which encompasses films where the content and style – often artistic or experimental – adhere with as little compromise as possible to the filmmakers’ personal artistic vision. This series is Free for Members.
Tickets on sale now!
Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis. [Janus]
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd Taghmaoui
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Language: French
Genre: Crime, Drama
"A vital, scalding piece of work."
— Staff, Time Out
"Hate is a blast of movie outrage, a genuine shocker."
— Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
"La Haine is an unmissable response to an unending emergency."
— Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
"One of the most blisteringly effective pieces of urban cinema ever made."
— Wendy Ide, The Times (UK)
"For anyone grown weary of French cinema's bourgeois sheen, La Haine is a wonderful wake-up call. See it."
— Geoff Brown, The Times (UK)
"As is so often the case with the greatest films, La Haine only seems to get even better with each passing year."
— Kaleem Aftab, BBC
"This visionary film elicits passion and provokes thought, and is that rare combination: a cult movie that is also a classic film."
— Ginette Vincendeau, Criterion
"The premise is timeless and borderless because it gives a voice to those who are silenced when they desperately need to be heard."
— Conor Soules, Ion Cinema
"[The film's] raw and righteous exploration of class conflict, racial discrimination and police brutality remains gut-churningly relevant today."
— Nick Levine, NME
"Mathieu Kassovitz’s account of police brutality is as ferocious a punch in the stomach as it was twenty-five years ago, and retains every spark of an explosive deconstruction of France’s treatment of minorities and widening social inequality."
— Matthew Anderson, Cinevue
"Twenty-five years on, the film is a fresh and seething indictment on poverty, race, media sensationalism, and institutionalised racism... La Haine remains a landmark of modern cinema and, hopefully, its message lands into the hands of a new generation trying to shake off the oppression of those currently in power and out of control."
— David Stewart, Dirty Movies
Support for the Moxie
Become A Member
