Directed by Robert Bresson • 1983 • France, Switzerland
Starring Christian Patey, Vincent Risterucci, Caroline Lang
In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency. Transposing a Tolstoy novella to contemporary Paris, L’ARGENT follows a counterfeit bill as it originates as a prop in a schoolboy prank, then circulates like a virus among the corrupt and the virtuous alike before landing with a young truck driver and leading him to incarceration and violence. With brutal economy, Bresson constructs his unforgiving vision of original sin out of starkly perceived details, rooting his characters in a dehumanizing material world that withholds any hope of transcendence.
Up Next in Sight and Sound Directors’ Poll: Greatest Films of All Time
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The Conversation
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola • 1974 • United States
Starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen GarfieldThe ultimate Watergate-era paranoia thriller, Francis Ford Coppola’s cold-sweat neonoir stars Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, an obsessive audio-surveillance expert who has been hired to track ...
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Where Is the Friend’s House?
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1987 • Iran
The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing KOKER TRILOGY takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of ...
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Touki bouki
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty • 1973 • Senegal
Starring Magaye Niang, Mareme Niang, Aminata FallWith a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s. In this French New Wave-influenced fantasy-drama, tw...
