All Gaul is divided into 25 movies

The Museum of Fine Arts has just announced the line-up for the 11th annual Boston French Film Festival, which will be running from July 6 to 23 at the MFA's Remis Auditorium. Looks pretty strong this year: 25 area premieres including the opening night film "Gabrielle," starring Isabelle Huppert; two new films from the 75-year-old Claude Chabrol; an existential zombie movie (what do you expect? It's French) called "They Came Back"; the latest films from Francois Ozon ("5x2"), Daniel Tanovic ("No Man's Land"), and Cedric Klapisch ("L'Auberge Espagnole"; screen appearances by actresses like Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, Sandrine Bonnaire, Nathalie Baye; and "Heading South," a humdinger about sex, race, and class from director Laurent Cantet ("Time Out") that had audiences frothing with rage at the Toronto Film Festival. That's usually a good sign.

Why is this annual Francophilic bash important? Because with foreign-language films finding it increasingly hard to play in this country and in this city -- many of these movies will get full theatrical runs in New York only -- this is one of your best chances to sample off-Hollywood fare. Given that Hollywood fare these days runs to "The Break-Up," "The Omen," and "The Da Vinci Code," you can't really lose.