The shock of the Nov. 13 attacks in and around Paris refocused attention on debates that have convulsed French society for decades — about the marginalization of the Muslim population, about the tensions between Islam and French Republican ideology, about the identity of the nation itself.

Is France defined by its language and traditions, by its geography, or by its universal ideals of liberty, brotherhood and equality? Filmmakers and artists have taken up these questions, often with more cogency than politicians or intellectuals. There are scores of movies — from elsewhere in Europe, from the United States, from Africa and the Middle East — that offer instructive viewing in the wake of the attacks. We have settled on six, all French and all relatively recent, that seem to us especially relevant to the painful, necessary work of thinking and understanding that lies ahead.

“Caché,” 2005, directed by Michael Haneke 

The family of a Parisian television intellectual, Georges (Daniel Auteuil), begins receiving mysterious videos surveilling the exterior of its home. Georges’s attempt to figure out who is doing this and why gives him nightmares and leads him to a childhood friend, an Algerian (played by a heartbreakingly good Maurice Bénichou), whose parents used to work for Georges. Mr. Haneke is an Austrian often working in France, and his outsider status affords him a particularly harsh vantage. “Caché,” like “Code Unknown,” his film from 2000, is obliquely about the sins of French complacency. Its terror works as an existential mystery and, in its great final closing-credit sequence, something more conspiratorial and timely: Failure to reckon with the past allows a future generation to do the reckoning for itself.