Jean-Luc Godard (born 1930) may be one of cinema's greatest names, but his films remain consistently abstruse and unseen by mainstream audiences. This is a situation the French-Swiss screenwriter, dir...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
In the phrase "the new sensibility"—it may or may not have been coined by Susan Sontag—the operative word is, of course, new, not sensibility. ...
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Critical Essay by Pauline Kael
Masculine Feminine is that rare movie achievement: a work of grace and beauty in a contemporary setting. Godard has liberated his feeling for modern youth from the Ameri...
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Critical Essay by John Weightman
[Le Gai Savoir] is such a silly and pretentious film that one cannot help wondering what Jean-Luc Godard is now up to. The hand-outs say that it was begun as a documen...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann
[Two or Three Things I Know about Her] is more interesting than many other Godard films because, for one reason, it seems to have sustained the director's ow...
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Critical Essay by Penelope Gilliatt
Godard's voice carries. He has finished two new films, "See You at Mao" and "Pravda," each about an hour long, in a style going t...
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Critical Essay by Joan Mellen
Wind from the East, one of the latest of Godard's revolutionary epics, fails miserably: first, aesthetically, because Godard cannot find a myth or a situation by w...
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Critical Essay by Colin Maccabe
In the programme notes to Mahagonny, the notes which Yves Montand refers to in Tout va bien, Brecht defines epic theatre in terms of a radical separation of its element...
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Critical Essay by James Monaco
The idea of participation is integral to Godard's films: it confronts us on every level. To paraphrase Le Gai Savoir, these are not the films that should be made,...
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Critical Essay by Dennis Giles
Weekend is the last film of Godard's contemplative phase, a film which prepares the break of 1968. With Deux ou trois choses of the previous year, it is a site on...
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Critical Essay by Terry Curtis Fox
While his work still graces repertory houses and college classrooms, it is no longer the predominant oeuvre, the major topic of conversation it once was. The man who...
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Critical Essay by J. Hoberman
Numero Deux is a mirthless caricature of domesticity. In addition to some startlingly explicit sex scenes, the film is crammed with garrulous grandparents, battles over t...
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Critical Essay by Michael Kustow
[Godard loves] defiantly simple definitions. Let me try one: a Godard film is one in which several people play a game which ends in a death. Yes, but that's not...
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Critical Essay by John Bragin
The essence of Jean-Luc Godard's La Femme Mariée is the transmutation of the dramatic into the graphic. The comings and goings of the characters, and the de...
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Jean-Luc Godard
