The French New Wave: Essential Films

The movement that reinvented cinema, 1958–1968: essential Nouvelle Vague films ranked by our composite score.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) leads with a composite score of 3.69.

1
Last Year at Marienbad1961 · Alain Resnais
3.69
Venice Golden Lion winner 1961 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1964 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #169
2
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg1964 · Jacques Demy
3.59
Palme d'Or winner 1964 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #122 · Criterion Collection spine #716
3
Breathless1960 · Jean-Luc Godard
2.85
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #14 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #38 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1960 #3
4
The 400 Blows1959 · François Truffaut
2.80
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #33 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #50 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1959 #5
5
The Cousins1959 · Claude Chabrol, Philippe de Broca
2.77
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1959 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1959 #4 · Kurosawa's 100 favorite films
6
Contempt1963 · Jean-Luc Godard
2.55
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1963 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #46 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #54
7
Alphaville1965 · Jean-Luc Godard
2.55
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1965 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1965 #5 · Criterion Collection spine #25
8
My Life to Live1962 · Jean-Luc Godard
2.09
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1962 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #157 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1963 #5
9
Pierrot le Fou1965 · Jean-Luc Godard
2.02
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1965 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #85 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1967 #5
10
Cléo from 5 to 71962 · Agnès Varda
1.59
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #14 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #52 · Criterion Collection spine #73
11
Jules and Jim1962 · François Truffaut
1.56
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1962 #2 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1964 #2 · Criterion Collection spine #281
12
Hiroshima mon amour1959 · Alain Resnais
1.53
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1959 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #169 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1959 #7
13
Bande à part1964 · Jean-Luc Godard
1.39
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1964 #1 · Scorsese's 39 essential foreign films · Criterion Collection spine #174
14
Le Bonheur1965 · Agnès Varda
1.36
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1966 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #152 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1965 #10
15
Weekend1967 · Jean-Luc Godard
1.32
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1967 #3 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1969 #4 · Scorsese's 39 essential foreign films
16
Lola1961 · Jacques Demy
1.16
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1961 #1 · Criterion Collection spine #714
17
Shoot the Piano Player1960 · François Truffaut
1.12
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1960 #4 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1963 #9 · Scorsese's 39 essential foreign films
18
La Jetée1962 · Chris Marker
1.07
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #35 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #67
19
Masculin Féminin1966 · Jean-Luc Godard
0.93
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1966 #4 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1968 #7 · Criterion Collection spine #308
20
A Woman Is a Woman1961 · Jean-Luc Godard
0.79
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1961 #2 · Criterion Collection spine #238
21
The Young Girls of Rochefort1967 · Jacques Demy
0.77
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #185 · Letterboxd Top 250 #140 · Criterion Collection spine #717
22
Zazie in the Metro1960 · Louis Malle
0.67
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1961 #7 · Kurosawa's 100 favorite films · Criterion Collection spine #570
23
Paris Belongs to Us1961 · Jacques Rivette
0.66
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1961 #3 · Criterion Collection spine #802
24
The Fire Within1963 · Louis Malle
0.66
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1977 #3 · Criterion Collection spine #430
25
The Soft Skin1964 · François Truffaut
0.59
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1965 #4 · Criterion Collection spine #749

Critics with cameras

The French New Wave is the only major film movement that began as film criticism. Its core members — Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette — spent the 1950s at Cahiers du Cinéma under André Bazin, inventing auteur theory and demolishing the respectable French "cinema of quality" in print before ever exposing a frame. When they picked up cameras, the polemic became a production method: real locations, natural light, portable Éclair cameras, direct sound, jump cuts, non-professional actors, budgets an order of magnitude below industry norm. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) — autobiography shot in the streets of Paris, ending on cinema's most famous freeze-frame — won Best Director at Cannes one year after the festival had refused Truffaut a press credential for his attacks on French film.

Breathless (1960) radicalized the grammar itself: Godard cut within continuous shots because the film was too long, discovered the jump cut as expression, and made improvisation, quotation and self-awareness the movement's house style. Around the two founding films spreads the constellation this page ranks: Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, from the parallel "Left Bank" group — older, more literary, equally radical), Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), whose real-time portrait of a woman waiting for a diagnosis has risen faster in recent critics' polls than almost any film of the era, and Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), the movement's tenderest experiment — a working-class romance sung through entirely, Palme d'Or attached.

The longest afterlife in film history

The Wave's direct output was brief — the standard periodization runs 1958 to about 1968 — but its consequences never stopped compounding. It established the director as author (the intellectual foundation of every national new wave since, and of American film school culture), proved that cheapness could be an aesthetic rather than a limitation (the founding charter of independent cinema), and made film history itself a working material — Godard and Truffaut's habit of quoting Hitchcock and Hollywood B-pictures is the ancestor of every cine-literate filmmaker from Scorsese to Tarantino. Our whitelist for this page follows the historians' consensus: the Cahiers five plus the Left Bank's Varda, Resnais and Demy, within the French industry of the long 1960s. The ranking, as everywhere on this site, is by composite canonical weight — and few pages demonstrate better how a movement's cheapest films became its most expensive legacies.