Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen)
Jean-Luc Godard 1983 France (1st time; DVD)
A female terrorist tricks her insane filmmaker uncle, Jean-Luc Godard, into lending her video equipment so she can pull off a heist; meanwhile, a clumsy security guard falls in love with her.
Instead of jamming as many different threads as possible into one extended essay, Godard builds an entire film around a few ideas; the result is one of his most accessible films. The camera hardly moves at all, as it films waves crashing to the shore, trains passing in opposite directions, and a violin quartet, whose music is edited into the narrative, so that the score, usually added in post-production, is, for the most part, actually diegetic. A clever, mature, and often profound film, perhaps overshadowed by his flashier work from the sixties.