DAYBREAK (LE JOUR SE LÈVE)

(Marcel Carné, 1939, b/w, DVD, amazon.fr, English subtitles)
The French coined the term “film noir” to describe the dark, bleak crime films coming out of America after the Second World War. But France had set the template for those films, before the war, in the doom-laden, poetic-realist melodramas which were the forte of actor Jean Gabin, director Carné, and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. Here Gabin (François) awaits incarceration or death, and reflects on the circumstances which brought him to this sorry fate.

THE RAVEN (LE CORBEAU)

(Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943, b/w, DVD)
If Chabrol has a rival for the sobriquet “the French Hitchcock”, it would be Clouzot, a more intense and pathological film-maker altogether. This nihilistic whodunnit about a series of poison-pen letters so exposed the guilt, paranoia and mistrust latent in a typical French town, it was banned first by the Vichy, and then again, after the war, as a slur on the national character. It would be four years before Clouzot was allowed to make another film.

DIABOLIQUE (LES DIABOLIQUES)

(Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955, b/w, DVD)
Clouzot’s shocker has Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot (the director’s wife) murdering the tyrannical headmaster of a boarding school in the bath — then losing the corpse, and/or their minds. Constructed with malicious glee, this influential thriller holds up better than its many imitators (the Americans remade it with Sharon Stone, Isabelle Adjani, and the director of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation). Legend has it that a disgruntled customer wrote to Alfred Hitchcock: “After seeing Diabolique my daughter refused to take a bath, and now after seeing Psycho she refuses to have a shower. What should I do with her?” Hitch replied: “Send her to the dry cleaners.”

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (LES YEUX SANS VISAGE)

(Georges Franju, 1959, b/w, VHS or DVD region 1)
One of the eeriest, most beautiful horror films yet made. Pierre Brasseur is Doctor Génessier. Crazed with guilt over a car accident which disfigured his beloved daughter (Edith Scob), and undeterred by repeated failures, he kidnaps young girls and grafts their faces on to his daughter’s, hoping that one will stick. In the meantime she haunts the grounds of their château, a tragic, ghostly figure in a diaphanous gown and white mask. It’s a gruesome but compassionate, poetic, even tender movie.

THE FINGER MAN (LE DOULOS)

(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962, b/w, DVD)
Dishonour among thieves as Melville pays tribute to American noir gangster thrillers (transplanting New York lampposts and subway entrances to Paris), and concocts some of the most fiendish and satisfying plot twists you’ll never see coming. The film hinges on the friendship between the burglar Maurice (Serge Reggiani) and his accomplice Silien (Jean Paul Belmondo), a police informer who cannot be trusted. Or can he? Melville plants enough seeds of doubt to harvest a forest of confusion.

THE HOLE (LE TROU)

(Jacques Becker, 1960, b/w, DVD region 1)
Becker spent a year in a German PoW camp, and was an assistant on Renoir’s La Grande Illusion. As if that weren’t sufficient grounding to make a prison film, he based this on a true story, co-wrote it with one of the original prisoners involved, and cast it with non-professionals, including another of the cellmates. The result is utterly authentic. Devoid of music and melodrama, the film builds tension through its precise articulation of time and space. Becker died two weeks after its completion, aged 54.

NIKITA

(Luc Besson, 1990, DVD)
An unabashed populist, Besson doesn’t make movies for critics. But sometimes the critics catch up with his supercharged entertainments (such as Léon, 1994) and exhilarating fantasies (The Fifth Element, 1998). Nikita is his best film because it’s more than the sum of its brilliant setpieces, and because Anne Parillaud (his wife for a time) finds emotional truth in a pulpy scenario taking her from drugaddled anonymity to robotic killing machine and finally, sentient, conflicted human being. The strong supporting cast includes Tchéky Karyo, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Jean Reno, and Jeanne Moreau.

L’APPARTEMENT

(Gilles Mimouni, 1996, DVD)
Max (Vincent Cassel) is engaged to Muriel (Sandrine Kiberlain) but an overheard conversation in a café rekindles his obsession with a former girlfriend, Lisa (Monica Bellucci), who disappeared from his life without a trace. But in tracking down Lisa, Max meets Alice (Romane Bohringer), and is drawn into a murder mystery. Wildly convoluted, Mimouni’s only film to date is orchestrated with astonishing skill, deftly interweaving past and present, and mirroring various Hitchcockian motifs in its sophisticated game of double bluff.

READ MY LIPS (SUR MES LÈVRES)

(Jacques Audiard, 2001, DVD)
Lonely, plain, and routinely exploited at her office job, Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) hides the fact that she is profoundly deaf from her employers. When she is given the opportunity to hire an assistant, Carla plumps for the oddball Paul (Vincent Cassel), a comprehensively underqualified but malleable parolee in whom she spots considerable potential. Audiard (whose father Michel scripted more than 100 features from the 1950s to the 1980s) has crafted a naturalist character study which morphs into an ingenious, gripping thriller without compromising its humanity.

STAR CHOICE

MIKE FIGGIS ON WEEK END

“Not a conventional thriller — but this is crammed full of ideas about cinema. I think that to understand Godard it helps if you love the idea of film and its possibility; in Week End, I never fail to find something new. For me it is one of the coolest films of all time, as cutting-edge now as when it came out in 1967. Godard is Dog — OK?"

Mike Figgis is the director of Cold Creek Manor (2003) and Leaving Las Vegas (1995)