The Films of Jean-Luc Godard
Breathless
A Woman is a Woman
My Life to Live
The Little Soldier
The Riflemen
Contempt
Band of Outsiders
A Married Woman (February 11/14)
A Married Woman details the tedious comings and goings of the title character (Macha Méril's Charlotte), with filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard using the protagonist's marital woes as a springboard for a series of nonsensical, infuriatingly abstract sequences and interludes. The movie, which is chock-a-block with instances of laughably pompous narration, progresses at a snail's pace and suffers from an almost total lack of elements designed to capture the viewer's interest, with Godard's static sensibilities exacerbated by an ongoing focus on Charlotte's aggressively mundane activities (eg Charlotte prepares for a night out, Charlotte attends a dinner party, etc, etc). Godard's stubborn refusal to even partially develop Méril's one-dimensional figure plays a significant role in the movie's downfall, to be sure, as the character is, for the most part, employed as a mouthpiece for Godard's eye-rollingly inconsequential musings on various issues. The expected inclusion of Godardian bits of nonsense - eg the image switches to negative during one scene - perpetuates A Married Woman's hopelessly irrelevant atmosphere, and it's ultimately impossible to label the film as anything more than a typically worthless art-house experiment from as overrated a filmmaker as ever has existed.
no stars out of 
Alphaville
Pierrot le fou (July 25/07)
Experimental to the point of inanity, Pierrot le fou surely marks the nadir of Jean-Luc Godard's long and prolific career - as Godard continually and consistently eschews things like character development and plot in favor of nonsensical elements that only grow more abstract as the movie progresses. The film - which follows Jean-Paul Belmondo's Ferdinand as he abandons his family and takes up with a young babysitter (Anna Karina's Marianne) - adopts a smug tone almost immediately, as Ferdinand and his wife attend a party where several guests are speaking in ad slogans. Godard likewise peppers Pierrot le fou with similarly "clever" bits of satire that are, more often than not, entirely needless and eye-rollingly obvious, with the movie's various problems exacerbated by the filmmaker's penchant for non-linear storytelling (eg Ferdinand and Marianne are inexplicably surrounded by a dead body and a cache of guns moments after their first encounter; did we miss a reel somewhere?) And while there are a few admittedly interesting and well-conceived scenes here and there - including a fascinating moment in which Ferdinand and Marianne steal a car from an auto body shop - Pierrot le fou is ultimately nothing more than an infuriatingly vague and utterly pointless piece of work (one that has clearly lost any relevance it may have once had; at the film's sparsely-attended press screening, one critic walked out midway through and another fell asleep).
no stars out of
Masculin-Feminine
Made in U.S.A.
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
La Chinoise
Week-End
A Film Like Any Other
Sympathy for the Devil
Joy of Learning
Numéro deux
Every Man for Himself
Passion
First Name: Carmen
Hail Mary
Detective
King Lear
Keep Your Right Up
Germany Year 90 Nine Zero
JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December
For Ever Mozart
In Praise of Love
Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinéma
Notre musique
Film socialisme
Goodbye to Language 3D
