ALPHAVILLE (1965) C widescreen 98m dir: Jean-Luc Godard

w/Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Laszlo Szabo, Howard Vernon, Michel Delahaye, Jean-Andre Fieschi, Jean-Louis Comolli

Intelligent and stylish fantasy about a trouble-shooter sent to a futuristic city where the dictator has a race of robots doing his bidding.

From The Movie Guide: "ALPHAVILLE is a brilliant satire of an alienated society that has been robbed of its poetry and emotion by science and technology. The film's central conceit --- and joke --- this that this dystopian futuristic society is actually contemporary France, and the pod-like, conformist mindset of its people already exists. All of the interiors were filmed in dehumanizing glass and concrete office buildings and hotels, filled with sterile corridors and fluorescent computer rooms. All of the exteriors take place in a nocturnal Paris illuminated only by car lights and flashing neon. The casting of Eddie Constantine is inspired, as he had established the character of the hard-boiled dick Lemmy Caution in a series of French movies based on Peter Cheyney's novels. With his trench-coat, fedora, cigarette, and craggy face, Constantine recalls a poor-man's Humphrey Bogart, nonchalantly shooting everything in sight. Raoul Coutard's superbly mobile camerawork and Paul Misraki's excellent score all contribute to a movie that proves that you need neither a huge budget or computer effects to make a classic sci-fi movie, but only imagination."