I just picked up the blu-ray for Godard’s Alphaville and realized I had a few reviews of his films from back in the day.  This review originally appeared on Celluloid Moon about 11 years ago, but in anticipation of writing up Alphaville I happily present this (and a few others) for your reading pleasure on Cinema Dual!

After three aborted attempts to watch Contempt (a film 11 years later I still haven’t watched) I decided to continue my Jean-Luc Godard education with Masculin, Féminin, his 1966 portrait of the youth culture in Paris in the months leading up to the 1965 presidential election. Working from his own screenplay, a loose interpretation on two short stories from Guy de Mauspassant, Masculin, Féminin is a flurry of different visual and aural ideas cut together and framed in a off-kilter documentary style whose purpose isn’t anything like a straight narrative, but rather an empathetic if distanced view of the lives of the young men and women Godard found himself surrounded by in Paris. As my third Godard film, after Breathless and Band of Outsiders, Masculin, Féminin feels like a subtle adjustment of gears: although many of the elements are the same, the intent here is more observation than to participation.

Continue reading “Masculin, Féminin (1966)”

I just picked up the blu-ray for Godard’s Alphaville and realized I had a few reviews of his films from back in the day.  This review originally appeared on Celluloid Moon about 11 years ago, but in anticipation of writing up Alphaville I happily present this (and a few others) for your reading pleasure on Cinema Dual!

It’s strange, but until watching Band of Outsiders my only exposure to Jean-Luc Godard was Breathless (reviewed here) almost eight months earlier.  Kind of a long wait between films, especially after the wonderful taste Breathless left in my mouth, but that wait may have made my feelings toward Band of Outsiders a little sweeter than they would have been otherwise.
Continue reading “Band of Outsiders (1964)”

I just picked up the blu-ray for Godard’s Alphaville and realized I had a few reviews of his films from back in the day.  This review originally appeared on Celluloid Moon about 11 years ago, but in anticipation of writing up Alphaville I happily present this (and a few others) for your reading pleasure on Cinema Dual!

Breathless may not have been the movie to “officially” kick off the French New Wave, but after its release there was little doubt it would be the standard bearer for the movement. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard based off a treatment by Francois Truffaut, Breathless leaps off the screen and tears into its story with a youthful exuberance that embraces its roots in American genre films while gleefully tearing apart the staid tenets of how those films are structured. Continue reading “Breathless (1960)”