A selection of films by France’s answer to Noël Coward, with an introduction by filmmaker Olivier Assayas, who is one of the Gallic raconteur’s biggest fans.

One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past half century, Chantal Akerman—who would have turned seventy this June—took a profoundly personal, aesthetically radical approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and alienation. Influenced b...

The wry, deadpan seriocomedies of Finland’s most famous director are infused with both a minimalist cool and the wintry, desolate spirit of their frequent setting, Helsinki. Whether surveying the desperate lives of the down-and-out in his bittersweet Proletariat Trilogy (SHADOWS IN PARADISE, ARIE...

Bridging Japan’s cinematic golden age and its freewheeling New Wave, Kon Ichikawa was a prolific transitional figure whose technical finesse and versatility were rooted in the craftsmanship of the classical tradition, but whose pervasive sense of dark-tinged irony gave his work a modern age. Thou...

The films of Bertrand Tavernier are suffused with his love for cinema. In addition to being one of France’s foremost auteurs, Tavernier was also a film critic and historian who drew from his deep knowledge of classic French and American cinema to create his own uniquely absorbing, finely wrought ...

Few filmmakers contemplated such weighty philosophical themes with as much authority as Polish cinema titan Krzysztof Kieślowski. Originally a documentary filmmaker, he turned to narrative with early narrative features like CAMERA BUFF and NO END that remained rooted in social reality—often garne...

With their blend of earthiness and dreamlike surrealism, the films of Federico Fellini dominated mid-twentieth-century art-house cinema. Though he began his career as a screenwriter for the neorealist titan Roberto Rossellini, Fellini quickly developed his own personal, poetic style in early triu...

Crime dramas, comedies, romances, tragedies, fantasies, documentaries, and, of course, coming-of-age stories—director Louis Malle did it all. This most unpredictable and eclectic of filmmakers enriched cinema over a nearly forty-year career that took him from the peripheries of the French New Wav...