The best Jean-Luc Godard’s 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.
Vivre Sa Vie
7.8/10
Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.
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.
The Married Woman
7.1/10
A superficial woman has conflict between choosing her abusive husband and her vain lover.
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.
Hitchcock/Truffaut
7.3/10
Filmmakers discuss the legacy of Alfred Hitchcock and the book “Hitchcock/Truffaut” (“Le cinéma selon Hitchcock”), written by François Truffaut and published in 1966.
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.
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.
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.
Made in USA
6.2/10
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.
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.
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.
The Lovely Month of May
7.9/10
Candid interviews of ordinary people on the meaning of happiness, an often amorphous and inarticulable notion that evokes more basic and fundamentally egalitarian ideals of self-betterment, prosperity, tolerance, economic opportunity, and freedom.
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.
Room 666
6.6/10
During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wenders asks a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera and answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?"
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.
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
Paparazzi
6.5/10
Paparazzi explores the relationship between Brigitte Bardot and groups of invasive photographers attempting to photograph her while she works on the set of Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris (Contempt). Through video footage of Bardot, interviews with the paparazzi, and still photos of Bardot from magazine covers and elsewhere, director Rozier investigates some of the ramifications of international movie stardom, specifically the loss of privacy to the paparazzi. The film explains the shooting of the film on the island of Capri, and the photographers' valiant, even foolishly dangerous, attempts to get a photograph of Bardot.
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.
Belmondo: Il était une fois le beau monde
