This is the film which famously includes close-ups of bubbles in coffee, bursting and reforming like the creation and dissolving of a universe; these gave Martin Scorsese the idea for the Alka-Seltzer shot in “Taxi Driver” ten years later. Shot in mostly crystal-clear color and widescreen by Willy Kurant…, the movie captures the look of consumerist culture gone mad with dispiriting sharpness, and ends with Godard ruefully anticipating "going back to zero.

…Two or Three Things – in many ways alongside the less political and more romantically-tinged Vivre sa vie (1962), which in addition to also treating the theme of prostitution likewise suppresses genre and the primacy of narrative with “documentary” techniques and qualities – contains arguably the most inquisitive, open, genuinely self-reflexive, philosophical, aesthetically innovative, at times lyrical and often funny cinema Godard has made.

The greatest film by the greatest post-1950s filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her presents the critic, humbled by the beauty of its surfaces, the density of its ideas, and the uncanny coherence of its fragmented structure, with a writing dilemma. If any film deserves a book-length exegesis, it is this one. Alternately, one pithy paragraph might do the trick.

While Godard’s formal and thematic concerns in 2 or 3 Things are often familiar, here he seems, in an explicit way that never quite resurfaced in his Maoism-obsessed period that immediately followed, to strive for transcendence. If his hushed narration seems to flatly bemoan modern life as “living inside a giant comic strip,” he senses ultimate freedom through people achieving interconnectivity, and by giving the objects that clutter their world a useful, properly proportionate meaning.

The film that is arguably the best artistic compilation of the political, intellectual, and cinematic currents of late-‘60s French culture also happens to be, as the late-great Susan Sontag wrote, "perhaps Godard’s greatest feature."

Godard complained, “I don’t want to work with her [Vlady] anymore,” and as he continued working with her, he made his displeasure felt. The scenes he shot with Vlady are bland, unenergized, affectless—and the contrast is all the more striking with Godard’s highly inflected, dynamic filming of the other objects in view, whether cityscapes or consumer products, on which his mental and visual interest was intensely concentrated. He composed these shots more carefully than those featuring Vlady.

The most intellectually heroic of Jean-Luc Godard’s early features… The central figure is Godard himself, who whispers his poetic and provocative ruminations over monumentally composed color ’Scope images and continually interrogates his own methods and responses. Among the more memorable images are extreme close-ups of a cup of coffee, while another remarkable sequence deconstructs the operations of a car wash. Few features of the period capture the world with as much passion and insight.

An exquisite essay-film with colors that snap and ideas to match. It’s a questing, irreducibly visual meditation as only Mr. Godard could produce, about a metastasizing Paris and vampiric consumerism, about the relation between word and image, about red, red cars and the wind in the trees.

At this point in his filmmaking evolution, Godard had all but abandoned classic narrative cinema in favor of the essayistic, the associative and the analytic. Thus in 2 or 3 Things, instead of a specific story, he offers us multiple, intersecting, fragmented stories involving gender, language, consumerism, imperialism and the topographies of desire represented by Paris and Juliette. Here, amid splashes of bold color, discordant sound and brilliant observation, the personal meets the political.

It was the second of three features by Jean-Luc Godard to open in 1967. It was followed by Weekend and has been surpassed by few films, then or now, for plastic dynamism and intellectual spark.

A highly eccentric and audaciously complex, but sincere, passionate, and infinitely fascinating exposition on identity, modernization, international politics, and consumerism.

Only a man who is sure of himself can admit defeat, Marina Vlady reads, and then disagrees with it. The author’s logic has sprouted wings: there is always the danger of confusing thought with reality. Godard’s quest to escape from thought into consciousness has been an almost constant theme. There is a particular satisfaction in this present incarnation, for art is for Godard a form through which one may achieve pure experience, and Two or Three Things is an ecstatic experience.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her, if not Godard’s best film, is perhaps his most achieved, This is not only because it ties together many of the strings his most recent work has left dangling, but because it is the first film one can properly regard as modern in the best sense of the word.