Like everything else, the secret of a good wine is in the timing: the timing of the grape-picking, the fermentation, the breathing. And the timing is just right in Autumn Tale, a luminous story set in the winemaking country of France; director Eric Rohmer, in his late 70s when the film was made, clearly waited until this particular bottle had reached the proper maturity. At the center of the film is the friendship between two gracefully middle-aged women: Vineyard owner Magali (Beatrice Romand, star of the previous Rohmer gems Claire's Knee and Le Beau Mariage), blunt and compact, is currently unattached. Isabelle (Marie Rivière, from Summer), willowy and slightly ditzy, is married-and would like to see Magali happily wed. A matchmaking scheme via the personal ads leads to a gentle, amusing, yet increasingly profound romantic confusion. At first glance, the film may seem like sun-dappled simplicity itself, but stick around for the final moments at the very tail of the end credits, and you'll appreciate the wise mingling of longing, satisfaction, and regret that have been percolating through the movie all along. Rohmer likes to make films in groups (the "Six Moral Tales" launched him onto the international film stage in the 1960s), and Autumn Tale rounds off a set devoted to the four seasons. The other films in the quartet are worthy enough, and Rohmer has the kind of adornment-free clarity that many great artists develop after a lifetime's worth of craft, but Autumn Tale is the best of the bunch: a warm, quiet masterpiece. -Robert Horton.

In the 1960s and early '70s, Claude Chabrol was celebrated as the Gallic Hitchcock for his crisp, character-rich thrillers. La Cérémonie, his 1997 hit adapted from Ruth Rendell's novel A Judgement in Stone, is a return to form, an assured domestic drama set in the upper-class household of the kind but condescending Lelievres family. Sandrine Bonnaire, excellent in an enigmatic, uncommunicative role, stars as their new, neurotically silent maid Sophie. She performs her duties efficiently and emotionlessly, staring out from behind an implacable, mask-like face born of loneliness and defensiveness. Isabelle Huppert is the town's gleefully misanthropic postmistress Jeanne, a gossipy, energetically insolent misfit who hates the Lelievres. When she becomes Sophie's best friend, her pathological game of taunts and gossip goes into overdrive with her sudden access to their house, and an already simmering class conflict boils over in unleashed anger. Chabrol charts the cascade of mischief and misunderstandings to its shattering conclusion, with a sensitivity to character and an eagle-eyed remove that makes the explosive climax all the more chilling. It's a devastating thriller, one of Chabrol's best, and a powerful portrait in hate and psychosis pushed over the edge in misunderstanding, manipulation, and mistrust. Jacqueline Bisset is the fumbling but sincere Mme. Lelievres, Jean-Pierre Cassel her complacent husband, and Virginie Ledoyen (A Single Girl) their sensitive young daughter. [+]

Often considered the real beginning of the French New Wave movement, this 1958 film, the first feature by Claude Chabrol, is also-strangely-underrated on its own terms. The story of a theology student (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns to his provincial home town for convalescence and reunites with his unhappy childhood friend (Gerard Blain), the film introduces many of Chabrol's pet themes and interests, particularly the Hitchcockian relationship between two characters who transfer or implicitly share a private experience or fate. Chabrol's consideration of that idea would naturally deepen and become more complex over the years (brilliantly in 1969's La Femme Infidele and Le Boucher), but at this career flashpoint it is a little overstated and obvious in religious allusions. Still, Le Beau Serge is an engrossing film with no shortage of dramatic momentum. The final act, driven by the main character's efforts at self-sacrifice, is as affecting as ever. -Tom Keogh.

Paul (François Cluzet) and Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) have what seems to be a storybook marriage. They love each other madly and have worked together to turn their little lakeside inn into a gorgeous resort getaway while raising an adorable son. But there's a problem: Paul is convinced Nelly is having an affair and his jealousy spins to insane proportions. Hallucinations and nightmares twist his dementia until he imagines her sleeping with every man in sight, and his obsessive spying turns Nelly's life into a living hell. Claude Chabrol (director of La Cérémonie, known as the Gallic Hitchcock for his cool thrillers of obsessive love and homicidal passion, created his film from an original unfilmed screenplay by Henri-George Clouzot (Les Diaboliques). He injects Clouzot's dark, misanthropic tale with a soupçon of Hitchcock's voyeuristic obsession, but ultimately makes the film his own with unexpected sympathy for Paul, whose pathological jealousy spins out of control in a chilling conclusion that leaves the viewers uncomfortably nestled in his madness. The film faced charges of misogyny upon release largely because Chabrol remained steadfast in his portrayal of Paul not as a monster but a victim of madness (somewhat at the expense of Nelly, an angelic sexpot whose loyalty and love is almost sacrificial), but ultimately that's what gives L'Enfer its unsettling power. -Sean Axmaker.

The third of Eric Rohmer's Four Seasons romances follows the indecision of a young man who juggles three women during his final summer between school and work. Drifting along the beaches of Brittany while waiting for his commitment-shy girlfriend, Lena, to meet him, Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud of Diary of a Seducer) becomes fast friends with pretty waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet, the grown-up Pauline of Pauline at the Beach a decade earlier) and has a fling with Margot's aggressive and sexy friend Solene before Lena finally shows. By then, Gaspard has inadvertently committed himself to all three women. It's a lovely portrait of awkwardness and ambivalence set against the gorgeous land and seascape of Brittany, and populated by pretty young performers. This, the most understated of Rohmer's sex farces, carries a bittersweet sting, but little of the emotional effervescence of his best films. While these characters are no less pretentious or vulnerable than his other lovers (who all seem to be emotionally at sea), Rohmer just skims the surface of their emotional revelation. His greatest achievement is the evocation of young adults caught between their teens and 20s, with little real experience but full of easily sidelined ideals. In the best Rohmer tradition, the circular conversations and solipsistic monologues are neither glib nor pretentious, merely the immature but sincere ramblings of vulnerable youth playing adult games. -Sean Axmaker.

A high point from the middle career of French New Wave original Claude Chabrol, Les Biches is one of the director's tales of complicated, intertwined fates leading to horrifying ends. Chabrol's then-wife, Stephane Audran, plays a rich bisexual who picks up an impoverished young woman (Jacqueline Sassard) and takes her to her home in St.  Tropez. There, much to her hostess's consternation, the visitor strikes up a romance with a handsome architect (Jean-Louis Trintignant), only to find that Audran's character is involved with him as well. The overlapping relationships grow full of rich mystery and dark possibility as the unwieldy situation begins to beg for a resolution. A study of class, desire, and compulsion, Les Biches has the hallmarks of Chabrol's streak of fascination with operatic fatalism. -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.

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.

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.