 Just getting started? Try our
Best French New Wave Films for Beginners.
or, explore all of our top 10 lists:
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TOP 10 TRUFFAUT FILMS
In his all too brief directorial career, Francois Truffaut (1932-1985) produced a remarkably varied body of work from the semi-autobiographical Antoine Doinel series to the Hitchcock inspired thrillers of the mid-60s to the later romantic period dramas. His career began with three accomplished classics – Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) and...
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TOP 10 GODARD FILMS < 1968
In consideration of Jean-Luc Godard’s prolific output, incomparable importance, and the decisive schism in his career that occurred in 1967/68, we have drawn up two lists covering his work. The first assesses the celebrated early years when cinephiles around the world awaited each new Godard release with eager anticipation. Cool, audacious, innovative, funny, intellectual and sexy...
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TOP 10 GODARD FILMS > 1968
Following the upheavals of 1968, Jean-Luc Godard threw himself into filmmaking with a renewed sense of purpose, collaborating with the ‘Dziga Vertov’ group on a series of explicitly political films, then experimenting with television and video in the mid-70s, before his triumphant return to the mainstream with "Sauve qui peut la vie" in 1979. The films and videos he has made since then are arguably ...
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TOP 10 CHABROL FILMS
In later years, Claude Chabrol would be described as ‘the French Hitchcock’, but the comparison is simplistic. While he shares with the English ‘master of suspense’ a preference for thrillers, a preoccupation with guilt, and a predilection for black humour, a study of his films in fact reveals a cinematic vision uniquely his own. Pitched somewhere between art films and popular ...
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TOP 10 ROHMER FILMS
Few directors in the history of cinema have so closely and revealingly observed the inner psychological of their characters as Eric Rohmer. Indeed he once described himself as being “less interested in what people do, than with what is going on in their minds while they are doing it.” As a screenwriter and filmmaker he was remarkably consistent in style and theme, remaining faithful to the theoretical approach to...
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TOP 10 RESNAIS FILMS
Alain Resnais is one of cinema’s great originals whose mastery of technique has been put at the service of some of the most thought-provoking and inspired films ever made. Influenced in his youth by comic-books and surrealism, he began his career with a series of remarkable documentaries, including most famously...
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TOP 10 MALLE FILMS
Diverse is the word that springs to mind when glancing through Louis Malle’s filmography. Ranging from existential film noir (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) to zany visual comedy (Zazie dans le Metro), big-budget costume adventure (Viva Maria!) to observational documentary (Place de la republique) – Malle’s body of work defies easy categorization. As Pauline Kael once wrote of him...
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TOP 10 VARDA FILMS
As the leading female filmmaker associated with the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has created a body of work whose scope and significance is the equal of any of the other major figures of the movement. Early on she invented the term cinécriture (ciné-writing) to describe her work, meaning...
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TOP 10 DEMY FILMS
Jacques Demy’s wistful, romantic films brought another dimension to the Nouvelle Vague in the 1960s. While his contemporaries were drawn to the aesthetics of Film Noir and Italian neo-realism, Demy loved the style and sentiment of American musicals, which he reset in a French context and transformed into something personal and magical...
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TOP 10 RIVETTE FILMS
Jacques Rivette, the so-called ‘man in the shadows’, is, as that sobriquet suggests, probably the least well known of the leading French New Wave directors. The phrase is equally apt as a description of the director’s work, which often seems to take place in a twilight world, one step removed from...
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TOP 10 MARKER FILMS
Writer, photographer, film essayist and multi-media poet, Chris Marker has never been an easy figure to define. In private life he was equally elusive, refusing to give interviews and never knowingly allowing his picture to be taken. What remained consistent throughout his career were the subjects that absorbed him: time, history and memory; travel and ritual; war and revolution; cinema and the natural world....
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TOP 10 FILMS BY LESSER KNOWN
DIRECTORS
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10 GREAT NEW WAVE PERFORMANCES
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| TOP 10 NEW WAVE SEX SYMBOLS
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10 BEST NEW WAVE LOVE STORIES
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| 10 FUNNIEST NEW WAVE FILMS
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10 BEST NEW WAVE THRILLERS
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| 10 BEST NEW WAVE NOIR
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10 STRANGEST NEW WAVE FILMS
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| 10 BEST NEW WAVE DOCUMENTARIES
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10 BEST NEW WAVE WAR FILMS
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10 FILMS THAT INFLUENCED THE NEW WAVE
- Sunrise (1927) - dir: F.W. Murnau
- The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) - dir: Fritz Lang
- L’Atalante (1934) - dir: Jean Vigo
- Le Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) - dir: Jean Renoir
- Le Corbeau (The Raven, 1943) - dir: Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Les Enfants Terribles (The Horrible Children, 1950) - dir: Jean-Pierre Melville
- Rear Window (1954) - dir: Alfred Hitchcock
- Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954) - dir: Roberto Rossellini
- Johnny Guitar (1954) - dir: Nicholas Ray
- Touch of Evil (1958) - dir: Orson Welles
full page top 10 list coming soon!
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10 BEST NEW WAVE SOUNDTRACKS
- Le Mepris (Contempt, 1963) composer: Georges Delerue
- Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) composer: Michel Legrand
- Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (Lift to the Scaffold, 1958) composer: Miles Davis
- Le Boucher (The Butcher, 1970) composer: Pierre Jansen
- Pierrot Le Fou (1965) composer: Georges Delerue
- A Bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) composer: Martial Solal
- Jules and Jim (1962) composer: Georges Delerue
- Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967) composer: Michel Legrand
- Les Biches (The Does, 1968) composer: Pierre Jansen
- La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night, 1973) composer: Georges Delerue
full page top 10 list coming soon!
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