PG, 90 mins
Jean-Luc Godard’s gloriously cool film has its 50th birthday this year, and this is a chance to see it remastered in black and white on the big screen. Breathless kick-started modern cinema, with its breakneck pace, jump cuts and detached, narcissistic characters. It stars 26-year-old Jean-Paul Belmondo as a petty car thief-turned-killer doing his Bogart take-off, and 21-year-old Jean Seberg as the gamine American in the Herald Tribune T-shirt and ballet pumps, along with Paris doing its very best to be luscious on screen.
The film’s louche spontaneity is partly because Godard wrote the script the night before, and shouted lines to the actors before each shot, redubbing the film afterwards. One of the iconic films of the French New Wave, Breathless is as fresh as it was in 1960. You could want no more.