La Belle Noiseuse is a thrilling and unconventional drama about the responsibility of an artist to his vision and the conflicts that arise when such responsibility is perceived as a threat to others. Michel Piccoli (Le Doulos) delivers one of his finest, most lived-in performances as Edouard Frenhofer, a famous painter living with his artist wife Liz (Jane Birkin) on a spacious estate in the French countryside. Frenhofer has lacked inspiration for a decade and has given up on painting. The idea behind his unfinished masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse ("The Beautiful Troublemaker"), has been seemingly unattainable for a decade; Liz was the original model for it, and Frenhofer's exhaustion with the project has an emotional parallel to his dispassionate relationship with her. Along comes a rising artist, Nicolas (David Bursztein), who suggests that his girlfriend, Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), a writer, could help Frenhofer jumpstart the painting's completion. From this point, most of La Belle Noiseuse becomes a remarkable, seemingly unedited and privileged look at the development of a bond between artist and muse. Béart, fiercely brilliant, spends the majority of the film nude and continually molded into sometimes-painful positions as Frenhofer struggles-sketch after sketch, paint upon paint-to find something beyond the obviousness of Marianne's body. As the two struggle to meet each other halfway, Liz and Nicolas feel marginalized and jealous, putting pressure on Frenhofer to disregard such personal concerns or give in to them. Adapted by French New Wave master Jacques Rivette from a story by Honore de Balzac, the lengthy La Belle Noiseuse is fascinated by the artistic process; it is itself a patient process of watching ideas and aesthetic courage reveal themselves in the face of extraneous aversion. -Tom Keogh.

With his aptly titled Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard embraced the widescreen splendor of Hollywood while thumbing his nose at Hollywood itself. A rebel with a cause, Godard pursues an iconoclast's agenda, using the Franscope format (expertly controlled by cinematographer Raoul Coutard) to undermine the grandeur of widescreen melodramas. The story ostensibly concerns an innovative production of Homer's Odyssey and the struggle of a respected screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) to please a pugnacious producer (Jack Palance), a veteran director (Fritz Lang, essentially playing himself), and a petulant wife (Brigitte Bardot) who's grown tired of their turbulent relationship. It's all pretense, however, for Godard's mischievous (and yes, contemptuous) deconstruction of commercial Hollywood filmmaking, potently infused with film-buff in-jokes, astute observations about love, stardom, and artistry, and enough glossy style to suggest that Godard had mastered the craft he so willfully rejects. Contempt is one of his most accessibly fascinating films. -Jeff Shannon.

Up Down Fragile is a luminously unique romantic musical set in summertime Paris. In beautiful sun drenched streets, cafes and parks three young lives intersect and are changed by an artist, a mystery, and a gun. Three of today's most talented young French actresses (Laurence Cote, Marianne Denicourt, Nathalie Richard) sing, dance and romance their way through Paris in this cinematic triumph directed by Jacques Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse", "Out 1", "Gang of Four") Up Down Fragile is a joyful burst of true cinema from one of the greatest French filmmakers of all time.

If one were to gather the hundreds of books written about Ludwig van Beethoven, sift through each with a fine-tooth comb, and extract every simple mistake, wild speculation, and outright falsehood, the result would still be nowhere near as fabulous and artificial as this 1936 biopic, which rewrites the composer's life story into a throbbingly melodramatic tale of genius ignored and love unrequited. Director Abel Gance, best known for his expansive silent classic Napoleon, wasn't interested in the truth of Beethoven's life, but instead the romantic ideal of a great man tormented by history; Gance's Beethoven is merely a variation of the filmmaker's beloved Bonaparte, triumphant yet scorned by his inferiors in the artistic realm rather than the political. (Needless to say, among the film's many omissions is Beethoven's bitter rededication of the "Eroica" Symphony. ) Beginning where every portrait of Beethoven the man must, with the identification of the Immortal Beloved, the film nominates (wrongly) Giulietta Gallenberg, née Guicciardi, reconstructing their brief passion as a lifelong obsession. During each of Beethoven's struggles-with love, poverty, deafness-thunder cracks against the sky and the opening notes of the Fifth burst onto the soundtrack to punctuate the action. Meet the film on its own novelette-like terms, however, and it can be quite moving, not least for the magnificent presence of Harry Baur in the lead, who captures to perfection the tortured nobility the film foists upon its protagonist. Baur's conception is as outsized as Gance's, but also gentler and less sentimental; he humanizes what could have been a treacly salute to a marble statue. An unusual final credit places the actor's name alongside the director's, a touching admission by Gance at how indebted his film was to its star. -Bruce Reid The silent epic and international cinema legend Abel Gance is most celebrated for his sweeping and pioneering biography masterpiece "Napoleon. " But this touching and tortured document of the legendary Beethoven's creative genius deserves equal tribute and attention. [+]

French filmmaker Claude Lelouch continues to take critical heat for this 1966 international hit, which has been labeled "schmaltzy" and dismissed as overly stylized for its simple story line. While it certainly can't be mistaken for a masterpiece of the French New Wave (Lelouch was left in the dust that year by such wonders as Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Feminin), A Man and a Woman has a jumpy impressionism that engages a viewer precisely because it cuts against conventional expectations of romance. Starring Anouk Aimée as a widowed "script girl" (working in film production) and Jean-Louis Trintignant as a racer who lost his wife to suicide, the film is really an objective sampling-almost a study-of moments between the time the two characters meet and the point at which they begin to read each other intuitively. Generous flashbacks fill in details on the pair's woeful, recent histories, while endless documentary-like glimpses of Aimée's and Trintignant's characters at work in their highly charged professions become a visual engine for the days passing between measured developments in love. Lelouch is more dryly humane than lush in his approach, though the film strains once in a while for a forced naturalism that can actually be more narcissistic than the most obvious romantic contrivance. Still, A Man and a Woman-in the best sense-is also a movie in love with itself, with its own ability to evoke and conjure and construct dozens of different ways of tracking a relationship in progress. If Lelouch doesn't exactly push open the boundaries of cinema as several of his filmmaking peers did at the time, he certainly enjoys what he's doing. -Tom Keogh.

While The Godfather was making moviegoers an offer they couldn't refuse, La Vallée was wowing art-house crowds with its flower-powered search for paradise in the jungles of New Guinea. It's there that an adventurous diplomat's wife (Bulle Ogier), hoping to find the forbidden feathers of a rare exotic bird, embarks on a deeper, more personal quest when she encounters a makeshift family of hippies seeking an unmapped valley from which visitors are said never to return. Like the structurally similar cult films from its era (including Walkabout and Aguirre: The Wrath of God), La Vallée dazzled the post-'60s subculture with free-spirited adventure and enigmatic beauty, captured here through the peerless lens of cinematographer Néstor Almendros. The hippie vibe seems mildly dated but its sensual context is timeless, and a climactic encounter with the primitive Mapuga tribe retains an intense cross-cultural mystique. Pink Floyd's celebrated soundtrack is mostly heard as background ambience, but it effectively enhances the film's compelling atmosphere of mystery and expectation. -Jeff Shannon Lush, sensual, and aurally hypnotic, this renowned cult classic from Barbet Schroeder (Barfly, Reversal of Fortune, More, Maitresse) was shot by the legendary Nestor Almendros, and scored by Pink Floyd. Set in the rainforest of New Guinea, a restless diplomat's wife, played by Bulle Ogier (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Maitresse), goes in search of a rare bird's priceless feathers. In the process she meets up with a group of hippies seeking spiritual and sexual enlightenment. Together they are transformed when they encounter the indigenous Mapuga tribesman and the secret "valley of the gods".

French Cancan is quite possibly the greatest backstage movie ever. Paris, the 1880s: a natty, middle-aged nightclub impresario named Danglard (a sublime performance by French superstar Jean Gabin) is between engagements, and liaisons, at the moment. But he has a vision of reviving the cancan, the high-kicking dance that has fallen into disuse. He becomes convinced that he can lead this revival by casting a laundress (Françoise Arnoul) in his new show at a club called the Moulin Rouge. While a blissful entertainment in every way, French Cancan is also director Jean Renoir's examination of the imaginative process of turning life into art. (Renoir has some venerated film classics to his credit, including Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, but this one can stand right up there with them. ) Danglard is clearly an alter ego for the great director, and his opening-night speech to his reluctant star, in which he declares that nothing is more important than what happens on stage, might be Renoir's own statement on art. The final cancan sequence is an explosion of color and movement, as all of Danglard's machinations come to flower; it's been known to leave revival-house audiences teary-eyed with pleasure. Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge may be very sly, but this is the real thing. -Robert Horton.

Jean-Luc Godard's most recent filmic adventure into the past and future of cinema is. JLG/JLG. Godard stars in JLG/JLG as a fictional character of his own creation musing about in his home in Rolle, Switzerland. In the dead of winter, he suffers the rude interruption of criticcs and the cheeky services of a pretty maid, while contemplating the end of western culture, cinema and his own mortality. A busy day. but still with time for tragedy, tennis and television.