Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard's feature debut was a cinematic blast across the bow of French filmmaking and international cinema, and stands as the definitive expression of the spirit of the burgeoning Nouvelle Vague. Jean-Paul Belmondo is the charming rogue of a street thug who kills a cop in a car theft getaway and stops off in Paris to woo his American girl (Jean Seberg in a career remaking performance) into coming with him to Italy. Dedicated to Monogram films, it's Godard's B-movie tribute, a crime movie taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up. In 1960, his free-spirited street shooting, jagged editing, audacious jump-cuts and lighthearted comic asides created a revolutionary sense of self reflexivity: a movie as much about the fact that it's a movie as anything going on in the story. Today it plays like a work of visual jazz, rough and improvisatory and full of marvelous solos and quotes.

"Chambre 12, Hotel du Suede," made for French TV in 1993, is a first-person documentary structured like a private eye movie. The conceit is a bit precious, but the wealth of information, the amazing array of subjects who were present on the set of the film, and the willingness of the director to entertain the sometimes conflicting testimony (the perspectives are, in many ways, the truth of the matter), makes this production irresistible. The title, by the way, is the address of the actual hotel room where Godard shot the hotel room scenes. "Charlotte at Son Jules" is Godard's 1959 lark of a short and his first collaboration with Belmondo. Criterion's impressive two-disc edition also features new interviews with cinematographer Raoul Coutard and assistant director Pierre Rissient; video essays from Mark Rappaport (the 19-minute profile "Jean Seberg") and Jonathan Rosenbaum ("Breathless as Criticism"); and 27 minutes of archival interviews with Godard, Belmondo, Seberg, and Jean-Pierre Melville from between 1960 and 1964 among the supplements. And dig that crazy French trailer, a neat mix of Godardian playfulness and commercial ballyhoo. The 82-page booklet features a new essay by film historian Dudley Andrew, archival articles and print interviews with Godard, and the original film scenarios by Francois Truffaut and Godard.

Also now out in new Criterion editions: a two-disc set featuring John Huston's "Under the Volcano" along with two archival documentaries and other supplements, and a "director-approved" edition of Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," featuring commentary and new interviews (though neither with Malick).