The Rules of the Game

The Rules of the Game is a 1939 French comedy drama directed by Jean Renoir, following an aristocratic household of guests and servants gathered for a country house shooting party on the eve of the Second World War. Its satire of upper-class indifference and moral drift was rejected by French audiences and censors on release and the film was banned outright during the war, surviving only through prints later used for a full restoration in the 1950s. Renoir's deep-focus cinematography and overlapping ensemble staging are widely credited with expanding what a single film frame could hold, and the film has placed among the highest-ranked titles in every Sight and Sound critics poll since the survey began in 1952.