The best Jean-Luc Godard’s drama movies
We present our ranking of the best Jean-Luc Godard’s movies. Do you love cinema? Or are you looking for a movie of your favorite actor to watch tonight? Surely you have some to see or that you did not know yet about Jean-Luc Godard.
Breathless
7.7/10
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.
Contempt
7.5/10
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.
The Married Woman
7.1/10
A superficial woman has conflict between choosing her abusive husband and her vain lover.
Cléo from 5 to 7
7.8/10
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.
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
6.5/10
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.
Vivre Sa Vie
7.8/10
Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.
First Name: Carmen
6.3/10
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.
The Image Book
6.2/10
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.
Paris Belongs to Us
6.7/10
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.
Le Petit Soldat
7.1/10
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.
Goodbye to Language
5.8/10
"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
King Lear
5.5/10
A descendant of Shakespeare tries to restore his plays in a world rebuilding itself after the Chernobyl catastrophe obliterates most of human civilization.
Notre musique
6.8/10
Jean-Luc Godard's poetic meditation on war, violence and defeat. The film is structured in three parts. The three segments are "Hell", "Purgatory", and "Heaven". The first segment is a montage of war images from documentary and fictional sources. The second concerns two young Jewish women attending a European arts conference in Sarajevo. The final segment concerns the after life.
Numéro deux
6.2/10
Jean-Luc Godard mixes video and film in his Grenoble studio, discussing how he secured funding for the film. The action unfolds on two monitors, as a young working-class couple lives in a claustrophobic, high-rise apartment complex and marital discord is set off by the wife’s infidelity.
Sign of the Lion
7.2/10
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.
The Defector
5.7/10
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.
Brunes et Blondes
Actresses' hairstyle in movies always carries a strong aesthetic statement associated with erotic, social, and historical meanings. In a bold and unexpected way, the film revisits this ultimate symbol of femininity in international cinema.
Keep Your Right Up
6/10
This film is made up several sketches in which certain actors play several real or fictional roles to a background of rock music. The lead character, played by Godard himself, is an annoyingly perfectionist film-maker determined to wring every last drop of the finest performance possible from his stars.
The Kreutzer Sonata
6.1/10
La Sonata à Kreutzer is a 16mm film based on a Tolstoy story and was written and directed by Eric Rohmer and produced by Jean-Luc Godard. The film follows a man (Rohmer) whose wife starts to fall for a another man (Jean-Claude Brialy). The film is a great look into the Nouvelle Vague in 1956, with Godard in a supporting role and a scene shot in the offices of Cahiers du cinema, with cameos by Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, and Andre Bazin. It was in reference to this film when Truffaut called Rohmer the master of 16mm.
Charlotte and Her Boyfriend
6.5/10
This short features a man who is visited by his ex-lover. The moment she arrives, the man starts his constant barrage of speech; the woman doesn't say much. She just mocks the man and pretends she isn't listening. She pulls faces at him and larks about; while the man is trying his best to get her back in his life, then in the next sentence he says he hates her.
