The best Jean-Luc Godard’s movies

A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he attempts to persuade a girl to run away to Italy with him.

A superficial woman has conflict between choosing her abusive husband and her vain lover.

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

Paula Nelson (Anna Karina), a female version of Humphrey Bogart's hard boiled detectives, goes to Atlantic City to meet her lover, Richard Politzer, at an unknown point in the future (maybe 1969). Once there, she learns that Richard is dead and decides to investigate his death. In her hotel room, she meets Typhus, whom she ends up knocking out. His corpse is later found in the apartment of David Goodis (Yves Afonso), a writer. Paula is arrested and interrogated. From then on, she encounters many gangsters.

A philistine in the art film business, Jeremy Prokosch is a producer unhappy with the work of his director. Prokosch has hired Fritz Lang to direct an adaptation of "The Odyssey," but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb at the box office, he brings in a screenwriter to energize the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills.

Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.

The protagonist is Carmen X, a female member of a terrorist gang. She asks her uncle Jean, a washed-up film director if she can borrow his beachside house to make a film with some friends, but they are in fact planning to rob a bank. During the robbery she falls in love with a security guard. The film intercuts between Carmen's escape with the guard, her uncle's attempt to make a comeback film, and a string quartet attempting to perform Beethoven.

"It's a simple subject. A married woman and a single man meet. They love each other, fight, blows rain down. A dog wanders between town and countryside. Seasons pass. The man and woman get back together. The dog comes between them. The other is in one of them. One of them is in the other. And then there are three people. The ex-husband makes everything explode. A second film begins. The same as the first. And yet, not. From the human species, we move on to metaphor. It will end in barking. And a baby's cries." JLG

Filmmakers discuss the legacy of Alfred Hitchcock and the book “Hitchcock/Truffaut” (“Le cinéma selon Hitchcock”), written by François Truffaut and published in 1966.

During the Algerian war for independence from France, a young Frenchman living in Geneva who belongs to a right-wing terrorist group and a young woman who belongs to a left-wing terrorist group meet and fall in love. Complications ensue when the man is suspected by the members of his terrorist group of being a double agent.

A young woman joins a theatrical troupe where she slowly believes that the director is involved with a secret group and that he is in grave danger.

An American in Paris lives by sponging off his working friends, and throws a party using borrowed money when his rich American aunt dies, believing firmly in his horoscope.

Jean-Luc Godard returns with a bracing, beautiful and confrontational essay film. Splicing together classic film clips and newsreel footage, often stretched, saturated and distorted almost beyond recognition, The Image Book interrogates our relationship with film, culture and global politics.

Two young people, Walter and Charlotte, are walking through a small village in Switzerland a snowy winter day. Walter introduces Charlotte to Clara, hoping to make Charlotte jealous. After saying good-bye to Clara, Walter accompanies Charlotte into her house, although she doesn't want him to. Charlotte is hungry and cooks a steak. She asks Walter if he wants a piece of it. He says no, but she gives him a small piece anyway. He wants a kiss, and she says no. She starts to compare herself with Clara, who Walter agrees is more beautiful. In spite of this, Walter says he likes Charlotte much more, but she thinks he is lying. She notices that he is cold and shivering. She hugs him, he kisses her, and she starts kissing him. After leaving the house he accompanies her to the train.

A descendant of Shakespeare tries to restore his plays in a world rebuilding itself after the Chernobyl catastrophe obliterates most of human civilization.

A subtitle warns, "beware of dark sunglasses." Anna and her lover, whose looks in bowler and bow tie are reminiscent of a young Buster Keaton, kiss chastely on a bridge overlooking the Seine. He dons sunglasses and waves as she runs down a stairway to the river's edge, then watches in horror as she's knocked flat and loaded into the back of a hearse. In vain, he gives chase. Disconsolate, he buys a large funeral wreath and a handkerchief from sympathetic vendors. He removes the glasses to wipe his eyes and realizes they are the cause of all his woe. He replays the farewell without the glasses.

An American scientist is sent by the CIA to East Germany to retrieve a secret microfilm from a Soviet scientist interested in defecting to the West but the Stasi secret police's surveillance complicates matters.

In seven different parts, Godard, Ivens, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais, and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War.