Jacques Bonnaffé

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.

The very last film by Jacques Rivette, the most consistently underrated of the French New Wave critics-turned-filmmakers (a group which includes François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard), Around a Small Mountain is a wry, gentle gem starring 60s icon Jane Birkin.