Jean Luc Godard

Latest Articles

Reichs and wrongs on the Croisette

Cannes we all just get along?
"I beat my kids regularly. Seems to do the trick. And I deprive them of meals."
By LISA NESSELSON | May 26, 2011

Review: Ne Change Rien

Jeanne Balibar is a formidable talent
The shadowy, low-key lighting is Wellesian, the fetishist close-ups are Sternbergian.
By GERALD PEARY | November 03, 2010

Conventional documentary on unconventional subjects
Emmanuel Laurent's documentary uses mostly conventional methods to tell how Cahiers du cinéma critics François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard rejected what they regarded as stuffy old-school cinema and set about to reinvent cinema by making their own films.
By PETER KEOUGH | September 01, 2010

Interview: Raoul Coutard

Breathless anticipation
It's embarrassing to confess, but the first time I went to see Breathless , I walked out after 20 minutes. I was 14, and it seemed clear to me that Jean-Luc Godard didn't know what the hell he was doing.
By PETER KEOUGH | July 07, 2010

Shock and awe

Breathless 50 years later
For a film all you need is a girl and a gun but you need someone to pay the girl and buy the gun." That's critic Colin MacCabe describing the genesis of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless , the French film that in 1960 revolutionized world cinema with its simplicity, its energy, and its jazzy spontaneity.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | July 06, 2010

Unmitigated Gaul

Rogues and rebels in the Boston French Film Festival
The French pride themselves on their revolutionary spirit, no less in film than in politics.
By PETER KEOUGH | July 05, 2010

Review: Saturday Night

Franco's debut documentary possibly better than an actual episode of Saturday Night Live
Actor James Franco’s debut feature, a behind-the-scenes look at the December 6, 2008, episode of Saturday Night Live , is kind of like Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil with less music and more fart jokes.
By PETER KEOUGH | April 21, 2010

Review: I'm Gonna Explode

Stuck on the roof
Gerardo Naranjo probably had the final image of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou in mind when he titled this tale of youth in revolt Mexican-style, but I don't recall rebels Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina being so vapid and annoying.
By PETER KEOUGH | January 06, 2010

Review: Public Enemies

Michael Mann's reheated crime waive
The gangster movie ruled Depression-era cinema — and that might be cause for concern about our present economic difficulties should the genre make a comeback.
By PETER KEOUGH | July 01, 2009

Soundtrack of her life

St. Vincent's latest album, Actor , goes deep
"I think that I secretly wish I was a filmmaker." Annie Clark may consider this some real hush-hush info, but even a cursory listen to Actor , her latest album (as St. Vincent), makes clear her cinematic aspirations.
By DANIEL BROCKMAN | May 13, 2009

Pop goes Wittgenstein

Jean-Luc Godard at the Museum of Fine Arts
"We were indeed in a political film — that is to say, Walt Disney plus blood." You might have read that bit of '60s film voiceover in a book, but it's unlikely you've ever heard Anna Karina speak it.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | February 18, 2009

Paul Schrader at the HFA

American contradictions
"I'm not sure what happened to me," says Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst, one of the least reliable of the director's succession of unreliable narrators, in the film named for her.
By CHRIS FUJIWARA | January 29, 2009

Wish-fulfillment for a burning world

The 2008 heroic holiday DVD and Blu-ray gift guide
From the shining big-screen debut of Iron Man to the large amounts of green produced by the Incredible Hulk, this was the year the public couldn't get enough of their favorite heroes.
By BRETT MICHEL | December 11, 2008

In the realm of Oshima

The HFA looks back at the bad boy of Japanese cinema
The HFA looks back at the bad boy of Japanese cinema
By BRETT MICHEL | December 05, 2008

Light show

Jagger and Scorsese start it up in Berlin
The biggest stars of this year’s Berlin Film Festival were neither actors nor directors.
By MATTIAS FREY | April 02, 2008

Notre ami Pierrot

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 omnibus rides again
“Film is like a battleground,” American director Sam Fuller pronounces famously at the cocktail party in Pierrot le fou .
By JEFFREY GANTZ | September 12, 2007

Delpy days

Julie finally makes her movie
If anyone deserves to make her own movie, it’s Julie Delpy.
By PETER KEOUGH | August 22, 2007

Before and after the Riot

Sly Stone’s lost utopia
When Sly Stone sang “Listen to the voices,” who could have known that, in just three years, voices of an entirely different sort would take him over?
By CHARLES TAYLOR | June 12, 2007

History as melodrama

Jewishfilm.2007
Nations lie about the past.
By PETER KEOUGH | April 13, 2007

Life, truth, and Jean-Luc

2 or 3 things we know about Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is 76 now, of fading productivity and perhaps fading health, and so we’re faced with the unfathomable prospect of no longer living in the Age of Godard.
By MICHAEL ATKINSON | March 06, 2007

Cinema belongs to him

The je ne c’est quoi world of Jacques Rivette
For many backlashing film scholars and canonical cinéastes, most of the big players in the French New Wave — Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Resnais, etc. — have been, over time, at least a touch overrated, save two: Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette.
By MICHAEL ATKINSON | January 03, 2007