CINEMA CLUB
Breathless (Godard, 1960)
Jean-Paul Belmondo steals a car, kills a cop, and spends the rest of the movie trying to convince an American girl to run away with him. She's reading the Herald Tribune. He's reading her face. Nobody wins. The film that made cool look effortless and then immediately made effortless look exhausting. You will want to smoke a cigarette after this even if you don't smoke.
A Summer’s Tale (Rohmer, 1996)
A guy goes to Brittany for the summer with no plan. Ends up tangled with three different women and does nothing decisive about any of it. Rohmer understood something most directors don't, that indecision is its own kind of drama. The most honest film ever made about being in your twenties and blowing it quietly.
La Collectionneuse (Rohmer, 1967)
Shot on the Côte d'Azur. Everyone is tan. Nobody has a job. A man tries to resist a beautiful girl who collects men the way other people collect reasons to leave. Rohmer makes doing nothing feel like a philosophical position. The most stylistically cool film on this list and nobody brings it up.
More Pretentious Films
Sherman's March (McElwee, 1986)
Starts as a Civil War documentary. Immediately becomes a man filming himself failing at love across the American South. He keeps the camera rolling through everything… rejection, obsession, women who are clearly too good for him. The accidental blueprint for every confessional filmmaker who came after. You'll recognize yourself in it more than you want to.
Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012)
New York, black and white, a woman who hasn't figured it out yet and is still somehow the most interesting person in every room. Shot to look like the French New Wave and written like someone who grew up watching it. The scene where she runs through the city to a David Bowie song is one of the best two minutes in recent cinema. Put this one on for the right person and see what happens.
La Piscine (Deray, 1969)
A couple on holiday in Saint-Tropez. A pool. An ex who shows up uninvited with a girl half his age. Alain Delon and Romy Schneider and too much sun and not enough to do. The whole film is tension that builds so slowly you don't notice how hot the water is getting until it's too late. Everybody looks incredible. Nobody gets out clean.
Adieu Philippine (Rozier, 1962)
A young guy in Paris has one summer left before the army takes him. He spends it in Corsica with two girls who may or may not be in love with him and definitely aren't telling. Jacques Rozier shoots it like nobody told him he was making a film. Sun-bleached and loose and completely alive in the way that only things with an expiration date can be. The whole movie knows it's running out of time. That's what makes it impossible to look away from.
Along the Coast (Varda, 1958)
Agnès Varda points a camera at the French Riviera and makes you feel slightly judged by it. Tourists in the sun. Bodies arranged on rocks like they have nowhere else to be, which they don't. Varda is 29 and already more interesting than everything around her. It's a short film technically commissioned as tourism footage. She made something else entirely. The Côte d'Azur before it became a reference.
Everybody Wants Some (Linklater, 2016)
A college baseball team. The three days before freshman year starts. No stakes, no plot, just a house full of guys who are good at things and know it. Linklater made this as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused and it might be the looser, more confident film. The rare movie about guys being guys that makes you genuinely want to be in that house.
And God Created Woman (Vadim, 1956)
Brigitte Bardot in Saint-Tropez, barefoot, completely unconcerned with what anyone thinks of her. There's a plot technically. It matters less than you'd expect. What matters is the dancing scene, which you will think about for days afterward without fully understanding why. Vadim pointed a camera at his wife and accidentally invented a type. The town, the light, the way she moves through a room like she owns it without having paid for anything. Everything that came after this was trying to get back here.
Sound of Metal (Marder, 2019)
A heavy metal drummer loses his hearing mid-tour. What happens next is not what you expect and not what he expects either. Riz Ahmed gives the kind of performance where you forget there's a camera. The whole film is about what you do when the thing that made you who you are is suddenly gone. Nobody has an easy answer for him. Neither will you.