French Films

What is it about French films that make me cringe? Often they receive rave reviews but I see only mediocrity. A few years ago I saw a film called, I think, "Hidden" which had rave reviews; I thought it above the average for depth but to me it had a sense of believing it was greater than it actually was. There was so much in it I wanted explained. There was a mystery that, to my mind, was never solved. And that is, I think, a feature of serious French films: they present something to the eye that appears to carry intellectual weight but doesn't; they present problems that they seem not to want to solve because, if they do, the game is given away, the emperor has no clothes.
In "The Kid with the Bike" the young lad who is in a sort of Borstal asks a stranger, a woman who he has clung to in a doctor's surgery to evade capture by the school's staff, if he can stay with her on weekends. Why does she say "yes"? No reason is given. You are not supposed to ask this question. The reason? It doesn't have an answer. But the makers of this film are wiser than me: later on the boy asks her the same question: "why did you take me in?" and she replies "I don't know". She acts mysteriously in a realistic setting. Why? Then there is the boy riding his bike: long sequences with the hand-held camera (in a car, no doubt) on him. Why? Are we supposed to be thinking the boy's thoughts? But we don't know what he is thinking or even if he is thinking.
This is a film that was enjoyable to watch and infinitely irritating to think about thoughout.
But French films are like that; they always have been. Except their thrillers like "Riffifi". Why don't they make more of them instead of trying to arty and intellectual. Trying to be!