Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

This film is the Godard I know and love! Self-reflexive, amusing and just plain absurd. And by absurd, I mean it was just so weird and out of the ordinary that it was ridiculous. Pierrot le Fou about a man named Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who leaves his wife and children for his ex-girlfriend Marianne (Anna Karina) and then joins her on a crime spree, humorously attacking people before stealing their cars. They go to the French Riviera and we discover Marianne is wanted for murder and is being chased by Algerian gangsters. When the gangsters attack, Ferdinand and Marianne become separated. We then see them reunite and Marianne runs away with her real boyfriend (who she said was her brother) and Ferdinand shoots Marianne and her boyfriend, then paints his face blue and decides to blow himself up by tying dynamite around his head. Although he regrets his decision at the last minute, he fails to extinguish the fuse and is blown up. (We then hear their voice-overs as we see the ocean and the film ends). The whole film is somewhat light-hearted yet there is an interesting tension between seriousness which Godard explores.

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)

Sweet, beautiful and surprisingly touching, Academy-Award winning film The Artist has rightly enchanted audiences and critics worldwide and become a darling of the film season. Like most people, I was curious to see how a silent film would be made in 2011. Although there seems to be so much nostalgia in the cinema industry at the moment, this film pushes the boundaries and challenges the current 3D blockbuster fad by going to the extreme length of recreating this historical style of filmmaking.