Leave it to Godard to re-invent sci-fi moviemaking with a New Wave budget, stealing images of modern Paris to throw us into a pop dystopian future. An ingenious mix of futurism, detective noir, and romance, with, of course, Anna Karina along with the indomitable Eddie Constantine as “Lemmy Caution”.

Buried treasure from the margins of the nouvelle vague, this poetic enigma sensitively captures young love through changing tides. Shot over three years in nostalgic color and shimmering black and white, Love at Sea is an elliptical marvel, and the first masterwork from French auteur Guy Gilles.

In all playful seriousness, the master of slow cinema Albert Serra surprised audiences with this homage to the legendary Jean-Pierre Léaud. Seen as an allegory for the mythical actor’s own slow decline, this grandiose piece provides some of the most beautiful Versailles imagery ever seen on screen.

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.