French New Wave Films: A Curated List and Their Iconic Directors

Band of Outsiders is Jean-Luc Godard’s least intimidating picture from this era. The film follows a group of three young people who plan a heist together. Of course, things don’t go as planned and chaos ensues. 

Jean-Luc Godard is at his most audacious directing the surrealist escape film Pierrot Le Fou which stars French New Wave icons Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

The film doesn’t quite hold up to the best of Godard’s works but it is an absolutely stunning work to look at because of excellent cinematography.

Shoot the Piano Player is perhaps most noteworthy for its use of cinemascope photography, but it’s also a great and daring story.

Les Cousins is a thrilling, psychological drama that pits two opposites against one another. Charles is an innocent hard working man while Paul is an extroverted performer with naturally endowed talent.

The only thing that these characters have in common is that they’re cousins. But when Charles falls in love with a woman with a promiscuous past, he threatens to destroy the thinly tied relationship he has with his cousin.

Jacques Demy’s feature directorial debut Lola is a winding story of love on the French coast. The film stars Anouk Aimee as a cabaret dancer who longs for the man that abandoned her seventeen years before. 

Adieu Philippine, perhaps better than any other film of the movement, imparts the feeling of wayward youthfulness that the French New Wave has become so synonymous with.

The film revolves around the impact of the Algerian conflict on French domestic life, which is something that was pervasive in many films of the French New Wave.

Francois Truffaut’s stirring wartime love story Jules et Jim is an essential film of the French New Wave. Jules et Jim follows the love triangle of two young men, (Jules and Jim) and their infatuation with a beautiful young woman named Catherine. 

Alain Resnais’ surrealist picture Last Year at Marienbad is one of the most visually haunting of all the films during this period. Last Year at Marienbad follows three unnamed individuals, two men and one women as they fight to make themselves known to another at a swanky party.

In many ways, Hiroshima mon amour started the French New Wave despite being made by Alain Resnais, a member of the Left Bank, a still radical but more establishment focused film group.

Hiroshima mon amour marked a giant leap forward for visual storytelling and film editing. It also established that French cinema was moving in a new direction both technically and narratively. 

Hiroshima mon amour took the restraints off the stagnant French film industry with overt sexuality, unabashed creativity and filmmaking techniques that were new and fresh.

Paris Belongs to Us is a stunning nightmare of the world at a moral and existential crossroads. The film follows a young woman named Anna who finds herself enraptured in a series of absurdist situations, all linked by death.

Agnes Varda is one of the most important figures in French cinema and Cleo from 5 to 7 is her most iconic work. The film follows two hours in the life of a beautiful and successful singer named Cleo. But despite having the world at her fingertips, Cleo is more miserable than ever and fears that she’ll receive bad news from a cancer test.

It’s awfully hard for a movie to be more depressing than Vivre Sa Vie is. Director Jean-Luc Godard’s portrait of a young woman who becomes a prostitute is about as bleak as narrative cinema comes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a great film. 

French New Wave filmmakers were massively inspired by the film movements that came before, including: German Expressionism, Italian Neorealism and the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

Breathless is largely regarded as the most defining film of the French New Wave, but why? Well it starts at the core of the picture and where it drew its inspiration from. 

What is there to say about The 400 Blows that hasn’t already been said? It’s stunning, beautiful, heartbreaking, despairing, hopeful and liberating all at once. The 400 Blows is the film that changed the landscape of French cinema and its popularity ushered in the New Wave.

Up Next

What is French New Wave Cinema?

We’ve ranked some of the best films of the French New Wave of cinema, but there’s a lot more to the movement than what we’ve gone over here. In this next article, we break down the French New Wave by looking at the movement’s defining characteristics and techniques.

Up Next: What is French New Wave? →