Dreyer’s transcendent silent masterwork remains as formally radical, visually overwhelming, and spiritually profound as ever—a film whose eternal close-ups seem to abolish the century between then and now.
The show must still go on in Nazi-occupied France in Truffaut’s elegantly mounted film that resists simplistic morality, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, as a theatre troupe attempts to keep art alive and unblemished in trying times.
A haunting blend of morbid realism and the fantastique, Franju’s cult French psychological horror follows a surgeon who, with an accomplice, lures and kills young women for their facial skin, as he attempts to transplant it onto his disfigured daughter.
A fervent, playful self-portrait that sees a bubbly yet wistful Varda at her most inventive, crafting a near-formless cinematic salute that reimagines what personal documentary filmmaking can be.
A man is arrested for an unknowable crime and plunged into a maze of bureaucratic dread in Welles’ audacious adaptation of Kafka’s seminal text, unfolding as a hallucinatory and shapeshifting study of guilt and power.
A quietly defiant and unconventional anti-war film, Melville turns passivity into resistance, using repetition, silence, and minute gestures to probe the human soul, as a highly-cultured Nazi officer installs himself in the home of an old Frenchman and his niece.
Rohmer’s provocative final entry from his ‘Six Moral Tales’ calls attention to the temptation of extramarital affairs, as a man in a happy marriage contemplates putting his immoral theoretical thoughts into practice.
Linklater brings his ‘hangout’ cinema vibe to the French New Wave era, centering on Godard’s attempt to direct his first feature, in this breezy, blissful ‘comedy’ (for cinephiles at least) that is nostalgia-laden and wonderfully cast.
A father, with son in tow, follows a group of ravers to find his missing daughter in the dusty desert of North Africa, in Laxe’s stunning, foreboding road movie about faith and despair, marked by thumping beats, shuffling bodies, and bellowing trucks.
Varda’s first feature in colour, one that screams vibrant, cheery optimism from the get-go, becomes an ironic, if unsettling, take on happiness, set against gender inequality, as a husband in a truly happy marriage begins an extramarital affair.
