Anticipating the French New Wave, Elevator to the Gallows is Louis Malle's masterpiece of suspense and film noir starring Jeanne Moreau, in the role that catapulted her to international stardom.

The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of director François Truffaut's difficult childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime.

A simple tale told in twelve Brechtian tableaux, Vivre Sa Vie is one of Godard's most deeply felt films, anchored by Karina's astonishing lead performance and Nouvelle Vague favorite Raoul Coutard's breathtaking cinematography of street-level Paris.

Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais' epochal Last Year at Marienbad has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering.

This is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard's tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, "the last romantic couple."