In a Paris hotel, a hotel detective—fired after a murder took place there—continues to investigate the death, helped by his inspector nephew and girlfriend. Meanwhile, boxing trainer Jim Fox Warner is praying that his boy will win so he can pay back the Mafia.

A film from Godard’s 1980s period of reinvention, Détective has images as beautiful as paintings and cleverly fragments shards of movie conventions to forge new critiques. Promising his producers a genre film, they instead got a caustically funny remix of all possible hotel movie mysteries.