Ranking All Of Director Jean-Luc Godard’s Movies
“What are Jean-Luc Godard’s Best Movies?” We looked at all of Godard’s directed filmography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!
We took all of the movies directed by Jean-Luc Godard and looked at their Rotten Tomato Critic, Rotten Tomato User, IMDB, and Letterboxd scores, ranking them against one another to see which movies came out on top. The movies are ranked in our list below based on which movies have the highest overall score between all 4 review sites in comparison with all of the other movies by the same director. The process is all very scientific with no flaws at all.
The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.
Happy Viewing!
The Top Film’s Of Jean-Luc Godard
73 ) Aria (1987)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 68
- Letterboxd User Score: 70
Ten short pieces directed by ten different directors, including Ken Russell, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, and Nicolas Roeg. Each short uses an aria as soundtrack/sound (Vivaldi, Bach, Wagner), and is an interpretation of the particular aria.
72 ) A Film Like Any Other (1968)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 68
- Letterboxd User Score: 67
An analysis of the social upheaval of May 1968, made in the immediate wake of the workers’ and students’ protests. The picture consists of two parts, each with with identical image tracks, and differing narration.
71 ) Pravda (1970)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 73
- Letterboxd User Score: 61
Filmed clandestinely in Czechoslovakia on 16mm. It’s one of the films Godard made with the Groupe Dziga Vertov – a Marxist film about the political situation after the ’68 revolution.
70 ) The Oldest Profession (1967)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 25
- IMDB User Review Score: 72
- Letterboxd User Score: 67
A collection of sketches on prostitution through the ages. 1) “The Prehistoric Era”: A caveman discovers that a cavewoman is more attractive when cave paint is applied to her face. And she can earn more seashells that way. 2) “Roman Nights”: The Emperor goes out seeking a little nocturnal amusement, only to find that the high-priced, Oriental courtesan he hires is his wife, the Empress. 3) “Mademoiselle Mimi”: In revolutionary France, Mimi finds that her client, the nephew of a marquis, is more interested in watching the guillotinings out her window than he is in going to bed. 4) “The Gay Nineties”: When Nini discovers by accident that her antiquated customer is a banker, she pretends to be an honest woman who has fallen in love with him. She even pays him, just like a gigolo! 5) “Paris Today”: Two girls pick up clients by driving around in a car…
68 ) Bridges of Sarajevo (2014)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 58
- Letterboxd User Score: 61
Thirteen European directors explore the theme of Sarajevo; what this city has represented in European history over the past hundred years, and what Sarajevo stands for today in Europe. These eminent filmmakers of different generations and origins offer exceptional singular styles and visions.
68 ) Vladimir et Rosa (1971)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 58
- Letterboxd User Score: 61
Jean-Luc Godard’s and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s interpretation of the Chicago Eight / Chicago Seven trial, which followed the 1968 Democratic National Convention protest activities. Judge Hoffman becomes the character Judge Himmler (played by Ernest Menzer) and the defendants become a microcosms of the French Revolution.
67 ) Struggle in Italy (1971)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 54
- Letterboxd User Score: 61
The film reveals how and why a supposedly revolutionary Italian girl has in fact fallen prey to bourgeois ideology.
66 ) 3x3D (2013)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 25
- IMDB User Review Score: 65
- Letterboxd User Score: 67
A triptych of short stereoscopic films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard and Edgar Pêra. Includes “The Three Disasters” by Godard, “Cinesapiens” by Pêra and “Just in Time” by Greenaway.
65 ) The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers (1964)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 30
- IMDB User Review Score: 65
- Letterboxd User Score: 61
We don’t have an overview translated in English. Help us expand our database by adding one.
64 ) Film socialisme (2010)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 23
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 38
- IMDB User Review Score: 68
- Letterboxd User Score: 55
A symphony in three movements. Things such as a Mediterranean cruise, numerous conversations, in numerous languages, between the passengers, almost all of whom are on holiday… Our Europe. At night, a sister and her younger brother have summoned their parents to appear before the court of their childhood. The children demand serious explanations of the themes of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Our humanities. Visits to six sites of true or false myths: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples and Barcelona.
63 ) See You at Mao (1970)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 54
- Letterboxd User Score: 55
Jean-Luc Godard brings his firebrand political cinema to the UK, exploring the revolutionary signals in late ’60s British society. Constructed as a montage of various disconnected political acts (in line with Godard’s then appropriation of Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s agitprop techniques), it combines a diverse range of footage, from students discussing The Beatles to the production line at the MG factory in Oxfordshire, burnished with onscreen political sloganeering.
62 ) Love and Anger (1969)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 34
- IMDB User Review Score: 62
- Letterboxd User Score: 55
Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman’s assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character’s return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.
61 ) 1 P.M. (1971)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 51
- Letterboxd User Score: 55
Lighter and livelier than the films Jean-Luc Godard had made in France, his U.S. collaboration with Direct Cinema documentarian D. A. Pennebaker was meant to be One A.M., as in “one American movie”; but Godard quit the project and the U.S., where to his dismay he discovered that revolution wasn’t imminent, and Pennebaker edited Godard’s material, to which he and Richard Leacock even added a bit more, releasing the result as One P.M., as in “one parallel movie.” It’s a stunning mixture of cinéma-vérité, political theater, and interviews of key sixties figures.
60 ) Sauve la vie (qui peut) (1981)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 30
- Letterboxd User Score: 71
Godard experimental film with montages combining “Sauve qui peut (la vie) and other films by other filmmakers
59 ) The French as Seen by…
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 39
- Letterboxd User Score: 61
In 1988, the Figaro magazine asked to a few famous directors a series of short movies, to celebrate the 10 years of the revue. The thematic : The French seen by – The movies have been released for the French revolution bicentenary. Werner Herzog – Les Gaulois David Lynch – The Cowboy and the Frenchman Andrzej Wajda – Proust contre la déchéance Luigi Comencini – Pèlerinage à Agen Jean-Luc Godard – Le dernier mot
58 ) King Lear (1987)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 27
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 33
- IMDB User Review Score: 71
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
A descendant of Shakespeare attemps to restore his plays in a world rebuilding itself after the Chernobyl catastrophe obliterates most of human civilization.
57 ) Cinétracts (1968)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 62
- Letterboxd User Score: 35
A series of 41 documentary shorts, directed (without credit) by several famous French filmmakers and each running between two and four minutes. Each “tract” espouses a leftist political viewpoint through the filmed depiction of real-life events, including workers’ strikes and the events of Paris in May ’68.
56 ) Lest We Forget (1991)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 25
- Letterboxd User Score: 71
Contre l’Oubli (Against Oblivion) is a compilation of 30 French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean Luc Godard among them, who use film to make a plea on behalf of a political prisoner. Jean Luc Godard and Anne Marie Mieville’s film concerns the plight of Thomas Wanggai, West Papuan activist who has since died in prison. The short films were commissioned by Amnesty International.
53 ) Le Vent d’Est (1970)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 54
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
Wind From the East is a product of Jean-Luc Godard’s involvement, during the late 60s and early 70s, with a collective filmmaking experiment known as the Dziga Vertov Group. The film is, typically of the films he made during this period, about ideas and simultaneously about how best to express those ideas through the medium of film. The film deals with the situation of a strike and, during its first half, methodically analyzes the different components of the strike: the workers, the radical students who encourage the strike while not quite being able to communicate in the same terms as the workers, the union delegates and other middlemen who preach moderation and compromise, the employers who demand the immediate resumption of work, the police state that suppresses the strike on behalf of capitalism.
53 ) How Is It Going? (1976)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 39
- IMDB User Review Score: 58
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
A film about politics and the media, in which two workers in a newspaper plant attempt to make a film.
53 ) Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 20
- IMDB User Review Score: 62
- Letterboxd User Score: 55
The film’s subject is a photograph of Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam War. It asks what the position of the intellectual should be in the class struggle and points out the irony of Jane Fonda’s participation in the photo shoot, which was staged.
52 ) Les enfants jouent à la Russie (1993)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 51
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
A famous French filmmaker is hired by a major Hollywood producer to make a documentary on the state of post-Cold War Russia. The filmmaker, though, subverts the project by stubbornly remaining in France and casting himself as the title character of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” offering up a series of typically Godardian musings on art, politics, the nature of images and the future of cinema.
51 ) Vrai faux passeport (2006)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 17
- Letterboxd User Score: 71
A dense work, citing everyone from Tarantino and Verhoeven to Artaud and Chaplin, made for Godard’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Voyage(s) en utopie.
50 ) The Seven Deadly Sins (1962)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 46
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
Seven directors each dramatize one of the seven deadly sins in a short film. In “Anger,” a domestic argument over a fly in the Sunday soup escalates into nuclear war. In “Sloth,” a movie …
49 ) Keep Your Right Up (1987)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 29
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 42
- IMDB User Review Score: 51
- Letterboxd User Score: 35
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.
48 ) Le rapport Darty (1989)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 43
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
A daring deconstruction of consumerist behaviour featuring a robot and Miss Clio Darty, with a voiceover by Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, this philosophical “report,” like so many of Godard’s commissions, was rejected by its funders.
47 ) Goodbye to Language (2014)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 13
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 35
- IMDB User Review Score: 65
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
About a man who’s angry at his wife because she’s met another man on a park bench and they no longer even speak the same language.
46 ) Le Gai Savoir (1969)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 36
- IMDB User Review Score: 46
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
Night after night, not long before dawn, two young adults, Patricia and Emile, meet on a sound stage to discuss learning, discourse, and the path to revolution. Scenes of Paris’s student revolt, the Vietnam War, and other events of the late 1960s, along with posters, photographs, and cartoons, are backdrops to their words. Words themselves are often Patricia and Emile’s subject, as are images, sounds, and juxtapositions.
45 ) Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 28
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 32
- IMDB User Review Score: 46
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL is an exhilarating, provocative motion picture. The Rolling Stones rehearse their latest song, “Sympathy For the Devil,” in a London studio. Beginning as a ballad, the track gradually acquires a pulsating groove, which gets Jagger into a rousing vocal display of soulful emotion that Godard is lucky enough to capture on film. Showing that rock and roll is more than just partying and goofing off, SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL is a brilliant portrait of the creative process at its most collaborative and arousing.
44 ) Six in Paris (1965)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 30
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
Six vignettes set in different sections of Paris, by six directors. St. Germain des Pres (Douchet), Gare du Nord (Rouch), Rue St. Denis (Pollet), and Montparnasse et Levallois (Godard) are stories of love, flirtation and prostitution; Place d’Etoile (Rohmer) concerns a haberdasher and his umbrella; and La Muette (Chabrol), a bourgeois family and earplugs.
43 ) The Image Book (2018)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 15
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 39
- IMDB User Review Score: 46
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
A passion project on fact and fiction to explore the contemporary Arab world, having shot for nearly two years in various countries across the region.
41 ) Soft and Hard (1985)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 30
- Letterboxd User Score: 35
Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville talk about their films, while doing everyday tasks around their house.
41 ) Oh, Woe Is Me (1993)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 37
- IMDB User Review Score: 46
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
This complex allegorical tale tells the story of man’s quest for spiritual meaning. When God enters the body of 1980s filmmaker Simon Donnadieu, his wife Rachel realizes that something has gone awry, but chooses to remain faithful to her erratically-behaving husband.
40 ) Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 39
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
An absurdly brutal and minimalist examination of the desperate search for financial backing by two small-time filmmakers, ‘Rise and Fall’ is knowingly self-referential, sad, and appropriately enough, a film shot on a miniscule budget in 16mm. Based on a novel by James Hadley Chase, with script by Jean-Luc Godard.
39 ) Godard’s Passion (1982)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 21
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 29
- IMDB User Review Score: 54
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did not like her union activities.
38 ) 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema (1995)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 30
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
At a lakeside hotel, Michel Piccoli discusses the centennial of cinema with Jean-Luc Godard. Godard asks why should cinema’s birthday be celebrated when the history of film is a forgotten subject. Through the remainder of his hotel stay, Piccoli tests Godard’s hypothesis.
37 ) Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2002)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 22
- IMDB User Review Score: 35
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
Collection of short films the summaries of which include; a foreign man moving to Italy, getting married and having a child; a four split scene short involving plot-less images of old people with television sets for heads, a beautiful woman having sex, and overall confusion; and an old man reminiscing over his youth.
36 ) Made in U.S.A (1966)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 12
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 31
- IMDB User Review Score: 43
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
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.
34 ) Tout Va Bien (1972)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 24
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 27
- IMDB User Review Score: 36
- Letterboxd User Score: 35
A strike at a French sausage factory contributes to the estrangement of a married filmmaker and his reporter wife.
34 ) Détective (1985)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 1
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 8
- IMDB User Review Score: 58
- Letterboxd User Score: 55
Emile Chenal and his wife, Françoise, leaned on boxing manager Jim Fox Warner to cough up the considerable sum of money that he owes them, with both the police and the mob circling the situation. In the same hotel, Inspector Neveu looks into a murder that took place years before, and his storyline overlaps with the arc of the Chenals.
33 ) In Praise of Love (2001)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 26
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 27
- IMDB User Review Score: 43
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
Someone we hear talking – but whom we do not see – speaks of a project which describes the four key moments of love: meeting, physical passion, arguments/separation and making up. This project is to be told through three couples: young, adult and old. We do not know if the project is for a play, a film, a novel or an opera. The author of the project is always accompanied by a kind of servant. Meanwhile, two years earlier, an American civil servant meets with an elderly French couple who had fought in the Resistance during World War II, brokering a deal with a Hollywood director to buy the rights to tell their story. The members of the old couple’s family discuss heatedly questions of nation, memory and history.
32 ) Notre musique (2004)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 25
- Letterboxd User Score: 19
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.
31 ) Scénario du film ‘Passion’
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 22
- Letterboxd User Score: 19
n Scénario du film Passion, Godard constructs a lyrical study of the cinematic and creative process by deconstructing the story of his 1982 film Passion. “I didn’t want to write the script,” he states, “I wanted to see it.” Positioning himself in a video editing suite in front of a white film screen that evokes for him the “famous blank page of Mallarmé,” Godard uses video as a sketchbook with which to reconceive the film. The result is a philosophical, often humorous rumination on the desire and labor that inform the conceptual and image making process of the cinema. —eai.org
30 ) For Ever Mozart (1996)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 25
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 8
- IMDB User Review Score: 39
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
For Ever Mozart is an episodic film that follows a theater troupe from France attempting to put on a play in Sarajevo. Along their journey they are captured and held in a POW camp, and they call for help from their friends and relations in France. Director Jean-Luc Godard presents stories about this troop to ask how one can make art while slaughters like the one in Bosnia are taking place, and he throws in a strong critique of the European Union. For Ever Mozart is one of Godard’s most disjointed and difficult films. Its stories sometimes seem to form a whole and at other times the links among them are unclear. One gets the impression that in each episode Godard attempts to start a film only to come to the conclusion that it is impossible to continue. It features some of the most beautiful shots of tanks in the cinema.
29 ) Le Petit Soldat (1963)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 13
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
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.
28 ) Six fois deux/Sur et sous la communication
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 17
- Letterboxd User Score: 19
The title and subtitle of this French miniseries are “Six Times Two; Over and under the media”. The “six” refers to the fact that there are six episodes; the “two” has a double meaning.
27 ) Les Carabiniers (1963)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 19
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 22
- IMDB User Review Score: 25
- Letterboxd User Score: 40
During a war in an imaginary country, unscrupulous soldiers recruit poor farmers with promises of an easy and happy life. Two of these farmers write to their wives of their exploits.
26 ) Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 16
- IMDB User Review Score: 22
- Letterboxd User Score: 35
This consists of four short films by different directors. Rosselini’s ‘Chastity’ deals with an attractive air hostess who receives the unwelcome attentions of a middle aged American. Godard’s ‘New World’ illustrates a post-apocalypse world the same as the pre-apocalyptic one but for an enigmatic change in attitude in most people, including the central character’s girlfriend. In Pasolini’s ‘Curd Cheese’, a lavish film about the life of Jesus Christ is being made in a poor area. The impoverished people subject themselves to various indignities in the name of moviemaking in order to win a little food. The central character is hoisted up on a cross for filming, and dies there. Finally comes Gregoretti’s ‘Free Range Chicken’ in which a family of the materialist culture inadvertantly illustrate the cynical, metallic voiced doctrine of a top sales theorist.
25 ) Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 22
- Letterboxd User Score: 7
The supremely world-weary Lemmy Caution, last seen in Godard’s “Alphaville” (France/1965), has several strange encounters while trying to make his way from the former East Germany to “the west.”
24 ) Toutes les histoires
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 17
- Letterboxd User Score: 7
Part 1 of Godard’s 8 part examination of the history of the concept of cinema and how it relates to the 20th century.
23 ) JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December (1994)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 41
- IMDB User Review Score: 13
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.
22 ) Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinéma (2004)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 10
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
“Histoire(s) du cinema” is an unique piece of art : you could see it as an essay about cinema, art and history, as well as a self-portrait of Jean-Luc Godard. “Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinéma”, edited in 2004, is a “best of” and a summary of every other episodes.
20 ) Far from Vietnam (1967)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 9
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
In seven different parts, Godard, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamees army during the Vietnam-war.
20 ) Nouvelle vague (1990)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 21
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 22
- IMDB User Review Score: 25
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
A hitchiker (Alain Delon) is taken in by a wealthy industrialist (Domiziana Giordano).
19 ) France/tour/detour/deux/enfants
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 6
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
In this astonishing twelve-part project for and about television — the title of which refers to a 19th-century French primer Le tour de la France par deux enfants — Godard and Miéville take a detour through the everyday lives of two children in contemporary France.
18 ) Every Man for Himself (1980)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 5
- IMDB User Review Score: 25
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
An examination of sexual relationships, in which three protagonists interact in different combinations.
16 ) Histoire(s) du cinéma
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 43
- IMDB User Review Score: 10
- Letterboxd User Score: 1
Well over a decade in the making, this eight-part, 265-minute video is Jean-Luc Godard’s magnum opus, but it’s never been widely seen… Daunting, provocative, and very beautiful, this meditative essay looks at the history of the 20th century through cinema and vice versa, mainly through a rich assortment of clips (sometimes superimposing more than one), sound tracks (sometimes paired with visuals from other films), poetic commentary (with plenty of metaphors), and captions.
16 ) First Name: Carmen (1983)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 13
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 7
- IMDB User Review Score: 39
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
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.
14 ) 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 6
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 20
- IMDB User Review Score: 30
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
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.
14 ) Hail Mary (1985)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 20
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 6
- IMDB User Review Score: 36
- Letterboxd User Score: 19
In this modern retelling of the Virgin birth, Mary is a student who plays basketball and works at her father’s petrol station; Joseph is an earnest dropout who drives a cab. The angel Gabriel must school Joseph to accept Mary’s pregnancy, while Mary comes to terms with God’s plan through meditations that are sometimes angry and usually punctuated by elemental images of the sun, moon, clouds, flowers, and water.
13 ) Numéro deux (1975)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 1
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 36
- Letterboxd User Score: 19
An analysis of the power relations in an ordinary family.
12 ) Here and Elsewhere (1976)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 30
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 4
- IMDB User Review Score: 13
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
Godard, Miéville and Gorin (aka the “Dziga Vertov Group”) examine the parallel lives of two families – one French, one Palestinian – using an exploratory combination of film and video.
11 ) Une Femme Mariée (1964)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 18
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 15
- IMDB User Review Score: 10
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
A superficial woman has conflict between choosing her abusive husband and her vain lover.
10 ) Alphaville (1965)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 11
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 3
- IMDB User Review Score: 17
- Letterboxd User Score: 19
An American private-eye, arrives in Alphaville, a futuristic city on another planet which is ruled by an evil scientist named Von Braun, who has outlawed love and self-expression.
9 ) La Chinoise (1967)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 1
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 19
- IMDB User Review Score: 17
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.
8 ) Weekend (1967)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 5
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 13
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.
7 ) A Woman Is a Woman (1961)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 15
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 14
- IMDB User Review Score: 6
- Letterboxd User Score: 7
Longing for a baby, a stripper pursues another man in order to make her boyfriend jealous.
6 ) Masculin Féminin (1966)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 10
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 13
- IMDB User Review Score: 6
- Letterboxd User Score: 7
With Masculin féminin, ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engaged in hopeless love affairs with music, revolution, and each other. French new wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud stars as Paul, an idealistic would-be intellectual struggling to forge a relationship with the adorable pop star Madeleine. Through their tempestuous affair, Godard fashions a candid and wildly funny free-form examination of youth culture in throbbing 1960s Paris, mixing satire and tragedy as only Godard can.
5 ) Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 17
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 12
- IMDB User Review Score: 4
- Letterboxd User Score: 2
Pierrot escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a girl chased by hit-men from Algeria. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run.
4 ) Band of Outsiders (1964)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 6
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 11
- IMDB User Review Score: 3
- Letterboxd User Score: 5
Cinephile slackers Franz and Arthur spend their days mimicking the antiheroes of Hollywood noirs and Westerns while pursuing the lovely Odile. The misfit trio upends convention at every turn, be it through choreographed dances in cafés or frolicsome romps through the Louvre. Eventually, their romantic view of outlaws pushes them to plan their own heist, but their inexperience may send them out in a blaze of glory — which could be just what they want.
3 ) Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 9
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 10
- IMDB User Review Score: 1
- Letterboxd User Score: 3
Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.
2 ) Contempt (1963)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 6
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 2
- IMDB User Review Score: 4
- Letterboxd User Score: 5
A philistine in the art film business, Jeremy Prokosch is a producer unhappy with the work of his director. Prokosch has hired Fritz Lang (as himself) 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.
1 ) Breathless (1960)
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 4
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 1
- IMDB User Review Score: 2
- Letterboxd User Score: 3
A young car thief kills a policeman and tries to persuade a girl to hide in Italy with him.
