Godard stars as an eccentric filmmaker in this fragmentary love poem from his 1980s period. Loosely based on Bizet’s opera, First Name: Carmen reinvents cinema into elliptical broken rhythms and passages of poetry to renew one of the oldest of tales: that of two lovers on the run.
Godard’s ‘60s films are legend, but his career went far beyond the French New Wave. Roundly condemned by the Vatican for its risky retelling of the Virgin Mary’s story, this is a highlight of his underrated ‘80s period, as cinema’s great experimenter refused to soften his provocative edge.
Winner of 7 César awards including Best Film, Xavier Giannoli’s lush adaptation of Balzac’s masterpiece smolders with the sins and pleasures of 19th-century Paris. Led by a dazzling Benjamin Voisin, this lavish parable of literary fame and moral decay elegantly mirrors our own era of misinformation.
In this lithe romantic triangle, Philippe Garrel shows us he only needs the barest means—plus 35mm B&W film—to tell a story. Co-scripted with his regular collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, the film oozes desire and intensity, as two women (one played by his daughter Esther) find out what love means.
A film from Godard’s 1980s period of reinvention, Détective has images as beautiful as paintings and cleverly fragments shards of movie conventions to forge new critiques. Promising his producers a genre film, they instead got a caustically funny remix of all possible hotel movie mysteries.
