Rent or Buy

Escaped from a reformatory, El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo) returns to the Mexico City slums, where his taunting of blind beggar Don Carmelo (Miguel Inclán) earns him the fearful respect of street kid Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) - until he seduces his mother, Marta (Estela Inda), and Pedro betrays Jaibo to the cops for killing rival gang member, Julian (Javier Amézuca).

Taking neo-realism into unchartered surrealist territory, its study of lust, greed, vengeance and despair owed little to such romanticised visions of poverty as Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946). Indeed, Buñuel consciously corrupted the neo-realist ideal by casting experienced performers like Miguel Inclán, Estela Inda and Roberto Cobo in principal roles and was only dissuaded by Dancigers from inserting such provocatively anachronistic details as a 100-piece orchestra playing in the background while Jaibo killed Pedro.

The Mexican critics were appalled by the feature's unflinching depiction of what amounted to a medieval peasant enclave in the midst of their supposedly cosmopolitan city and denounced Buñuel for failing to alleviate the misery with some optimistic fantasy (as opposed to the unnerving slo-mo nightmare, in which Pedro endures the cruelty of both Marta and Jaibo). Dancigers was so intimidated by such negativity that he withdrew the picture after two days and it was only Buñuel's Best Director win at Cannes the following year that secured its reputation and rescued him from the obscurity into which he had lapsed since the release of the equally uncompromising documentary, Las Hurdes (1932).

Although Gabriel Figueroa's meticulous imagery occasionally works against the lacerating content, this remains a potent exposé of the depravity into which humanity is lured when it loses hope. Refusing to judge and offering no easy solutions, Buñuel implied that the only way to conquer such base criminality was to start at the top. Consequently, this shattering indictment of social indifference is more relevant than ever.

It's 50 years since British audiences first heard the name Jean-Luc Godard. The release of A Bout de Souffle (1960) sent shockwaves through the cinematic establishment and confirmed that the nouvelle vague was much more than a Gallic flash in the pan. Yet, despite it being reissued in a luminous new print, some critics are beginning to suggest that this landmark picture is showing its age and may not have been that momentous an achievement after all. Let's set the record straight.

Rarely has a feature debut had such a seismic impact. And yet it boasted a scenario that wouldn't have been out of place in a bargain basement programmer.

Small-town hood Michel Poiccard - alias Laszlo Kovacs (Jean-Paul Belmondo) - steals a car in Marseilles and casually kills a cop with a gun he finds in the glove compartment. He heads for Paris to collect the unpaid debts that will enable him abscond to Italy with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a Sorbonne student who makes ends meet selling the New York International Tribune on the Champs Elysées.

As the dragnet closes in, the couple leave the Hôtel de Suède and hide out at a friend's house. But, having interviewed famous author Parvulesco (Jean-Pierre Melville), Patricia is struck by his words on immortality and her desire to become a journalist prompts her to betray Michel when she is threatened with arrest and deportation.

The pulp fiction that became a cornerstone of arthouse cinema was inspired by a newspaper article spotted by François Truffaut, who was working on his own full-length debut, Les 400 Coups (1959). But Hollywood Bs like Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1949) proved just as significant, as Godard set out to break with traditional concepts of characterisation, structure and narrative causality.

But rather than simply rejecting conventions that had held since the 1910s, Godard mischievously subverted them. Bypassing such standard practices as establishing shots, transitions and shot-reverse-shot sequences, he used a lightweight, handheld camera to shoot in long takes, which he periodically disrupted with jump cuts. Such a nonchalant approach adhered to the idea of the caméra stylo (one of the many theories that Godard picked up while reviewing for the influential journal, Cahiers du Cinéma), which proposed that a director became an auteur by utilising the camera as a pen.

This individualism was reinforced by the use of digressions, in-jokes and filmic references, such as the fact that Michel models himself on the iconic Humphrey Bogart, that Seberg's performance echoes her own in Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958), and that the shot through the poster tube recalls one by Samuel Fuller down a rifle barrel in Forty Guns (1957). The film is even dedicated to Monogram Pictures, one of Hollywood's Poverty Row studios that subsisted on cheap Westerns and the kind of crime and noir flicks that Michel seems to believe he's inhabiting.

Yet for all its nostalgia, the film is relentlessly modern, thanks to the raw immediacy of Raoul Coutard's location shooting and the plethora of cultural ephemera with which Godard specks the screen. Indeed, he anticipated the 60s mindset and the slogan, `To Live Dangerously to the End', was a clarion call for both his fellow new wavers and the generation whose political awakening was to transform global society.

Jacques Demy is the forgotten man of the nouvelle vague. Yet his films are every bit as cinematic as Claude Chabrol's, as personal as François Truffaut's and as subversive as Jean-Luc Godard's. His feature debut, Lola (1961), is a musical without songs. But it's also a homage to Demy's hometown of Nantes and the movies that moulded him.

Although Demy claimed that his chief inspiration was Max Ophüls's Le Plaisir (1952), this is a picture stuffed with allusions. As well as the ironic inclusion of the Gary Cooper vehicle, Return to Paradise (1953), there are also references to Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel (1930), Gene Kelly in On the Town (1949), Marilyn Monroe in River of No Return (1954) and Jean-Paul Belmondo in A bout de souffle (1960), along with any number of Hollywood happy endings. But a shot of poetic realism also permeates this waterfront saga, which recalls such bittersweet nostalgic gems as Marcel Pagnol's Marius trilogy (1931-36) and Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934).

Essentially, this is a rondelay of broken dreams, with Anouk Aimée working in a cheap cabaret in order to raise her seven year-old son by the absconded Jacques Harden, while his mother, Margo Lion, paints distractedly in Catherine Lutz's bar while trying to convince herself that he remains a dutiful son, even though she hasn't heard a word from him since he left. Prodigal Marc Michel similarly drifts through a life still tainted by an unrequited adolescent crush on Aimée, which comes full circle when he encounters widow Elina Labourdette and her 14 year-old daughter Annie Duperoux in a bookshop. Even Alan Scott, the shoreleave sailor that Harden nearly runs over in his car has regrets, as he leaves Aimée's bed to return to his fiancée Stateside.

Raoul Coutard's camera captures the subtly shifting scene in a fluent monochrome CinemaScope that is complemented by Michel Legrand's playful score. But it's Demy's lightness of touch, even in the lowlife subplot, that makes this as enchanting as its semi-sequel, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).

On the surface, Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962) is a pseudo-real time odyssey around Paris in the company of a chanteuse awaiting some critical medical results. However, Corinne Marchand's fate and her preoccupation with her fading fame and beauty are merely pretexts for director Agnès Varda to challenge the rules of classical film-making, as she manipulates time, space, colour, genre and audience expectation in each ingenious sequence.

Exposing cinéma vérité to be as superficial as Marchand's chic friends, Varda delights in jump-cutting a swathe through narrative convention. At one point, she even invites Jean-Luc Godard to be her film-within-the-film accomplice. Pacifist and feminist subtexts abound, but this is primarily a brilliant work of cine-liberation that ranks among the nouvelle vague's most audacious and significant achievements.

A natural-born performer, who has become so inured to her public image that she has almost forgotten her true self, Marchand is awaiting news of some cancer tests. In order to pass the time, as Paris comes alive at the end of a working day, she visits fortune teller Loye Payen, who foresees sickness in her tarot reading, but withholds the fact that Marchand has picked the Death card. Deciding that she should make the most of the fact that she is still young, successful and beautiful, Marchand crosses the city with no-nonsense cabby Lucienne Marchand and takes coffee in a café with assistant Dominique Davray, whose attempts at providing solace smack of duty rather than true affection.

Buoyed slightly by purchasing a new black hat, Marchand returns to her luxurious apartment for an unsatisfactory encounter with lover José Luis de Villalonga. A visit to pianist Michel Legrand and lyricist Serge Korber proves even less felicitous, although Marchand fails to detect the contempt they have for both her talent and her personality. As it's the first day of summer, Marchand wanders alone for a while, joining a small crowd watching a street performer swallowing live frogs. However, her fragile confidence is soon dented again, as she plays one of her own songs on a café jukebox and endures the humiliation of nobody recognising her.

She seeks reassurance from her friend Dorothée Blank, but she is modelling nude for a group of artists. So, Marchand calls in on Blank's projectionist boyfriend Raymond Cauchetier, who attempts to cheer her up by showing her a comic film featuring Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine. But it's only when Marchand meets a complete stranger, soldier Antoine Bourseiller, that she finally makes a genuine connection. He is on leave from the war in Algeria (which had previously been mentioned on the taxi radio alongside a report on Edith Piaf's health) and his concern for Marchand, as he walks her to the doctor's surgery, ends the picture with the tantalising prospect that the couple might just be falling in love as they are about to confront their destiny.

Indebted to both the gravitas of the Left Bank school of French film-making and the more mischievous New Wave, this exceptional, exhilarating and often elusive feature can variously be seen as a satire on artistry and the vacuity of fame, a treatise on the status of women, an exposé of urban ennui, a denunciation of colonialism and a human interest melodrama. Yet, while viewers search for meaning (and the secret of the missing 30 minutes in Marchand's two-hour sojourn), Varda distracts them with the brilliance of Jean Rabier, Paul Bonis and Alain Levent's restless handheld photography, the dexterity of Pascale Laverrière and Jeanne Verneau's editing, the acuity of Bernard Evein's production design and the teasing modishness of Michel Legrand's score. Moreover, she forces the audience to confront the filmicness of the action, as she switches boldly between authentic artifice and ersatz reality.

A fascinating contrast can be had with the restraint evinced by Eric Rohmer in My Night with Maud (1969). The third of Rohmer's `Six Moral Tales' is a typically teasing and intellectually intriguing study of human foible. Stylishly shot in monochrome by Nestor Almendros, it makes slyly effective use of both the provincial and Yuletide settings to explore the friction between reason and religion and to question the biblical contention that man's greatest obstacle to eternal salvation is woman.

Catholic engineer Jean-Louis Trintignant moves to the small French town of Clermont-Ferrand. Obsessed with chance and probability, he convinces himself that Marie-Christine Barrault is the woman he will marry after he spots her at church. However, when old friend Antoine Vitez introduces him to enlightened divorcée Françoise Fabian, Trintignant winds up spending the night in bed with her, discussing life, the universe and human insignificance. She is taken with him. But he spurns her advances and, next day, sets off to try and find Barrault and tell her how he feels.

Trintignant sets himself up as a paragon in control of his appetites and opinions, as well as his destiny, and it's clear that he intends to allow nothing to deflect him from his righteous path. Moreover, he refuses to contemplate that the selection of a wife via certain rigid criteria might conspire against him because his faith will protect him against caprice. But a series of chance encounters begin to challenge his complacent convictions, even though the first - his sighting of the ideal Barrault across a church - seems to confirm his belief that God is rewarding him for a life in which risk and morality have been balanced (albeit at the expense of passion and self-awareness). However, the unexpected reunion with Vitez subjects him to both his philosophical probing and Fabian's secular sensuality.

Despite the force of Trintignant's performance, our narrator is a weak hypocrite who uses his faith (which he maintains more out of habit than certitude) to justify his failings and inconsistent attitudes. His protestation of predestination as an excuse for past dalliances also exposes his cowardly refusal to take responsibility for his actions and both Vitez and Fabian seek to make him confront the shallowness of his stance - he by citing Blaise Pascal and the logic of the mathematics that governs Trintignant's profession; she by arousing his physical and sexual appetites.

By shooting in black and white, Rohmer was able to emphasise the film's endless contrasts (most notably between the blonde Barrault and the brunette Fabian and the purity of the sunlit snow and the allure of nocturnal temptation). But while this is a subtly cinematic work, it's the finely tuned dialogue that makes it so fascinating and humorous and so worthy of its Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign-Language Film.

While the French were riding the New Wave, the Second Italian Film Renaissance had rather burned out and actors of the calibre of Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti found themselves in unsubtle sex comedies and garish comic-book adaptation.

Mario Monicelli's Casanova `70 (1965) earned Oscar nominations for a sextet of screenwriters that included Age and Scarpelli, Tonino Guerra and Suso Cecchi d'Amico. But there was a resistible smugness about this laboured satire on the impact of female emancipation on the modern male - or, more particularly, on Mastroianni's NATO major, who is informed by psychiatrist Enrico Maria Salerno that his inability to sustain a relationship with a woman lies in his addiction to sexual encounters in perilous places.

Dismissing the notion that he should become celibate for his own safety and disregarding the feelings of his devoted fiancée, Virni Lisi, Mastroianni throws himself into a round of dangerous liaisons. Having kissed lion tamer Liana Orfei in the middle of her circus act, he beds commanding officer's wife, Margaret Lee, and Sicilian fireball Jolanda Modio, whose kinfolk are all dedicated to the preservation of her honour. But he still craves excitement and, having added the conquests of an air hostess, a chambermaid and a prostitute to his resumé, he begins a pursuit of opera singer Marisa Mell - in spite of the fact that she is married to murderously jealous aristocrat, Marco Ferreri, who is nowhere near as short-sighted as the lovers believed.

Yet this frantic farce generates precious few laughs. Monicelli makes the most of glitzy locations and relishes the odd moment of knockabout - such as Mastroianni being chased out of a restaurant by a posse of dwarves. However, this is very much a product of its time, right down to Aldo Tonti's Technicolor photography and Armando Trovaioli's free-spirited score. Consequently, its value now lies primarily in its insight into the Swinging Sixties on the Continent.

Monica Vitti was the pin-ip girl of Italian arthouse in the 1960s. But she came a cropper when she tried to ditch the image forged in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni in Modesty Blaise (1966), one of the most calamitous misfires of the decade that also set back the career of its exiled American director, Joseph Losey.

Inspired by the comic strip created by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway, this was modishly designed by Richard Macdonald, photographed by Jack Hildyard and scored by John Dankworth. But the storyline is incidental to the string of eccentric set-pieces and Vitti receives dismayingly little assistance from her usually dependable co-stars, Terence Stamp (as her sidekick Willie Garvin) and Dirk Bogarde, as her louche nemesis, Gabriel.

Hired by British bigwigs Alexander Knox and Harry Andrews to deliver some diamonds to Arab sheik Clive Revill, Vitti and Stamp soon realise that they are being double-crossed during an encounter with a magician and his glamorous assistants in Amsterdam. However, while Knox and Andrews are certainly duplicitous, the real threat to the agents comes from Bogarde's elusive criminal mastermind, who has convinced Interpol of his demise and operates from a gadget-filled monastery on a remore Mediterranean island.

Having instructed assassin Rossella Falk to murder treacherous mime Joe Melia, Bogarde tricks Stamp into participating in the submarine raid on the gems. But he fails to take into account Vitti's resourcefulness and the closeness of her relationship with Revill, who raised her in the desert and taught her every trick she knows.

Packed with garishly staged incidents and sketchily drawn characters - including troubleshooter Michael Craig, whose allegiance veers between Vitti and Andrews without any obvious rationale - this super-spy spoof could never be accused of lacking invention. Indeed, it even closes with a cornball duet between Vitti and Stamp.

But, for all its vibrancy and knowing chic, this is clearly the work of a director trying too hard. Losey isn't helped by Evan Jones's chaotic script. But the jokes are over-cooked, the performances are wildly inconsistent and the strained tone of levity even succeeds in suggesting that those making the picture weren't having that much fun, either.

Adapted from a story by Aleksandr Grin - who was known as the `Russian Edgar Allan Poe' - Juraj Herz's Morgiana (1971) earned him a two-year ban from film-making for its excessive formalism. However, the fact that the original ending was removed suggests that the Czech authorities recognised the subversive aspect of this Gothic melodrama, as rather than centring on an envious woman attempting to murder her sister, the tale was supposed to turn on a schizophrenic attempting an elaborate act of self-slaughter.

Both played by Iva Janžurová, Viktoria and Klára inherit houses from their late father. However, the plain, black-clad Viktoria resents the fact that her residence is in the country, while the radiant, red-headed Klára's is in the centre of the town and reinforces her popularity with the local menfolk. Consequently, she decides to murder her sister using a slow-acting poison that cannot be detected. However, the woman supplying the toxin suspects that Viktoria is upto no good and begins blackmailing her. But Viktoria is more than prepared to kill to achieve her goal.

Evocatively designed by Zbynek Hloch to suggest a 19th-century dystopia with unmistakable contemporary references, this is a visually striking picture that is made all the more unusual by Jaroslav Kucera's use of wide-angle lenses and distorted colours both to convey the hallucinations that Klára experiences whenever she catches sight of something orange and the point-of-view of Viktoria's Siamese cat, Morgiana, who acts as both judge and jury in the climactic sequence by preventing Viktoria's maidservant from rescuing her from a guilt-deflecting suicide bid. Indeed, the disconcerting imagery takes this out of the Hammer orbit and into the realm of a Jean Rollin or Ken Russell fantasy, as Herz is clearly as intent on provoking as scarifying.

Herz later revealed that he lost interest in the project and completed it as an exercise in technique. But it's a shame that it's no longer possible to gauge the impact of his preferred denouement, even though there is still something darkly satisfying about Viktoria getting her comeuppance in the classic Poe manner.

The emphasis is more on the grotesque in Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981), a political allegory that was ludicrously placed on the Video Nasty list at the time of its initial release. Indeed, it would be wrong even to consider this as a horror film and it's worth noting that the BBFC has never requested the excision of a single second of its disconcerting content. A searing study in division, isolation, anguish and the presence of evil, this is a remorselessly difficult picture that is not made any easier to view by the overwrought nature of the performances and the extravagance of the camerawork. Nevertheless, the story of Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani's separation deserves to be mentioned alongside such raw studies of marital frustration and pain as Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage (1973) and Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009).

Returning to West Berlin from an espionage mission on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Neill finds Adjani distracted and desperate to leave him in charge of their son, Michael Hogben. When she doesn't come home, Neill begins to suspect she is having an affair and demands that best friend Margit Carstensen divulges Adjani's whereabouts. But, even when he manages to track down the haughtily eccentric Heinz Bennent (who still lives with his melancholic mother, Johanna Hofer), it quickly becomes clear that Adjani is cheating on them both.

Briefly distracted by a teacher at Hogben's school (who is a dead-ringer for Adjani), Neill hires private detective Shaun Lawton to follow his wife and agent Carl Duering soon tracks her down to a rundown tenement in the Turkish part of town. However, Adjani's paramour is a hideously tentacled fungoid creature that devours both Duering and Lawton in between marathon love-making sessions to which the seemingly betwitched Adjani is all too willing to submit herself.

Produced at the height of the Solidarity uprising and on the back of Zulawski's distressing divorce from Polish actress Malgorzata Braunek, this is a highly personal film with a far-reaching geo-political theme. Desperate to expose the wickedness that he perceived had possessed his country, Zulawski shows how someone as beautiful and gentle as Adjani could be corrupted and made to betray the very things she most valued. He certainly pulls no punches and the subway sequence in which Adjani goes into excruciating labour did much to earn her the Best Actress prize at Cannes. However, there is also something shocking about the helpless look on her face as she is being ravished by the monster (which eventually takes on Neill's appearance) and in the dead eyes of her seemingly chaste dopplegänger.

Zulawski has conceded that any number of interpretations of the action are valid. But this is a film that will leave a much deeper intellectual and aesthetic (as opposed to emotional) impression if one watches the accompanying `making of' documentary first. Many critics expected Sophie Marceau (who bore Zulawski a son in 1995) to become the new Adjani. However, she never quite managed to make a similar impact on the international scene, despite such engaging performances as her rousing lead in Bertrand Tavernier's playful swashbucker, D'Artagnan's Daughter (1994).

Eloïse d'Artagnan (Marceau) is completing her education in a convent school in the south of France when the Mother Superior (Pascale Roberts) is killed during a search for a runaway slave by a mysterious woman in a red dress. Convinced that this augurs ill for King Louis XIV (Stéphane Legros), Eloise disguises herself as a male and heads for Paris in the company of poet Quentin la Misère (Nils Tavernier) in the hope of persuading her father (Philippe Noiret) to reunite with his old comrades Athos (Jean-Luc Bideau), Porthos (Raoul Billerey) and Aramis (Sami Frey).

However, D'Artagnan is initially reluctant to return to active service, as not only has he fallen on hard times, but the years have also been unkind to his physique. But, once he realises the threat posed to the throne, he is ready to do his patriotic duty and accept a little assistance from his comely daughter in confounding the schemes of the Duc de Crassac (Claude Rich) and Eglantine de Rochefort (Charlotte Kady).

Impeccably designed and costumed by Geoffroy Larcher and Jacqueline Moreau and photographed by Patrick Blossier with a fluency that is matched by Philippe Sarde's score, this makes for brisk, slick entertainment. Noiret steals every scene in which he features, but Marceau makes a dashing heroine until she is taken captive and has to be rescued by the geriatric musketeers. Despite its origins in the novel by Alexandre Dumas, the action owes much to Gérard Philipe adventures like Fanfan la Tulipe (1952) and Richard Lester's enjoyable Three Musketeers trilogy (1973-89). Yet the plot meanders in places and Tavernier over-compensates by resorting to some incongruous slapstick.

Paul Féval's classic adventure Le Bossu was originally serialised in the French periodical La Siècle in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, five film-makers had failed to solve the problem of linking the episodes into a seamless narrative and, while Philippe De Broca (who had guided Jean-Paul Belmondo through Cartouche in the early 60s) succeeded in producing some sabre-rattling entertainment, too many segments in his 1997 adaptation climaxed with an invisible caption proclaiming `to be continued'.

Sixteen years have passed since the most famous swordsman in France, the Duke of Nevers (Vincent Perez), was stabbed in the back by his scheming cousin, Gonzague (Fabrice Luchini). But, unbeknownst to the dastardly banker, Nevers's daughter, Aurore (Marie Gillain), survived his ambush and is living with a theatrical troupe under the protection of Lagardère (Daniel Auteuil), an honorable rascal who alone knows the secret of Nevers's legendarily lethal sword thrust. Sworn to avenge his master's murder, Lagadère assumes the identity of a hunchbacked financier and begins plotting Gonzague's downfall.

Although Daniel Auteuil isn't anyone's idea of a man of action, he emerges from this rousing romp with flying colours. Handling a sword with aplomb and playing the hunchback with pantomimic glee, he dominates the second half of the picture, only faltering slightly in the more tender scenes with Gillain, who is no longer content with their `father-daughter' relationship.

Le Bossu cost 120 million francs to make. Yet for all its pace and polish, there's something old-fashioned and rather forced about it. Jean-François Robin's photography is too overtly painterly, Christian Gasc's costumes are too perfectly period. Even the acting is over-eager, with Fabrice Luchini, in particular, playing to the back row of the Comédie Française rather than the camera.

Like Tavernier in D'Artagnan's Daughter, De Broca is caught between parody and reverence for the Christian-Jaque school of swashbuckling. Yet this undemanding crowd-pleaser leaves the Leonardo DiCaprio version of The Man in the Iron Mask trailing in its wake.