European Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s: 43 Films to Watch, From Truffaut and Melville to Fellini and Bergman
Twenty years. That’s roughly the window between Truffaut’s first feature and Buñuel’s last, and European cinema has never been this good, this varied or this sure of itself since. The French New Wave tore up the studio rulebook, Jean-Pierre Melville turned the gangster film into something close to ritual, and the Italians, Swedes, Germans and Spaniards each found their own way to make pictures nobody in Hollywood would have dared to.
This is a watch list, not a canon. Forty-three films, grouped by the people who made them, each with a line or two on why it’s worth your evening. Some are famous, a few are less so, and more than you’d guess started life as a novel. That last part is why a site about fiction and its screen versions is the right home for it: Melville filmed Joseph Kessel, Godard filmed Alberto Moravia, Visconti filmed Lampedusa, and the best crime films of the period came out of the books of a former death-row prisoner named José Giovanni.
If you only have time for five, start with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Army of Shadows, Le Samouraï, A Man and a Woman and The Conformist. Then come back for the rest.
Truffaut, Godard, Demy and Varda: the New Wave and its children
The 400 Blows (1959, François Truffaut). Technically a year early for this list, and it doesn’t matter. Antoine Doinel, played by a fourteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, skips school, lies to his parents, steals a typewriter and ends up in a reform school. Think of a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with the lights turned down. Nobody has caught how hard it can feel to be a child better than this, and the last shot, Antoine running to the sea and turning to look straight at us, is one of the great endings in film.
Jules and Jim (1962, Truffaut). Two friends, one Austrian and one French, and Catherine, the woman they both love. Jeanne Moreau plays her as restless, funny and dangerous in equal parts. It’s a film about male friendship that keeps getting knocked off course by a woman who refuses to be anyone’s muse. Truffaut adapted it from Henri-Pierre Roché’s 1953 novel, which Roché wrote in his seventies, looking back on his own life.
Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979, Truffaut). The Doinel films kept going. Truffaut followed Léaud’s Antoine for twenty years, through the short Antoine and Colette and Stolen Kisses to these two, where he marries, has a child, cheats, divorces and drifts. Watch them in order after The 400 Blows and you get something no franchise has managed since: one actor and one character growing up together on screen.
Day for Night (1973, Truffaut). A film about making a film, with Truffaut himself playing the harassed director. Affairs, a cat that won’t perform, an actor who dies mid-shoot. It’s the warmest movie ever made about how chaotic movies are to make, and it won the Oscar for best foreign language film.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964, Jacques Demy). Every line is sung. That sounds like a gimmick for about five minutes, and then Michel Legrand’s score and the wallpaper and the umbrellas in colours that look painted by hand take over. Catherine Deneuve is a shop girl, Nino Castelnuovo is the mechanic she loves, and then he’s sent to fight in Algeria. If you don’t cry at the ending at the petrol station in the snow, I don’t know what to tell you. It won the Palme d’Or.
The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967, Demy). Camper and sunnier than Cherbourg. Deneuve and her real sister Françoise Dorléac play twins in a seaside town, Gene Kelly turns up as an American composer, and the whole town seems to dance. Dorléac died in a car crash a few months after it opened, which gives it an ache it never meant to have.
A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973, Demy). Marcello Mastroianni is a driving instructor who gets pregnant, and Deneuve is the partner who runs a hair salon. It’s a comedy, a slight one, and the French title is a joke all on its own: The Most Important Event Since Man Walked on the Moon. Not Demy at his best. Still fun, and still years ahead of its subject.
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962, Agnès Varda). A singer waits two hours for the result of a cancer test and wanders around Paris while she does. It plays out close to real time. Varda, married to Demy from 1962 until his death, had a documentary eye that Truffaut and Godard never quite had, and this is the film where you see it.
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977, Varda). Two women, one a singer and one a mother, stay friends across fifteen years and the French fight over abortion rights. It’s a feminist film that’s also generous and tuneful, which is rarer than it should be.
Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard). Jean-Paul Belmondo as a small-time car thief who models himself on Bogart, Jean Seberg selling the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées, and jump cuts that made every film school in the world rewrite its syllabus. If you watch it, follow it with Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, his 2025 film about the making of Breathless.
Contempt (1963, Godard). A screenwriter, his wife (Brigitte Bardot), a brutish American producer and Fritz Lang playing himself, all on Capri trying to film The Odyssey. It’s from Moravia’s novel Il disprezzo, and it’s the Godard film for people who don’t think they like Godard. I came to Godard late and not entirely willingly, but this one won me over.
Pierrot le Fou (1965, Godard). Belmondo again, this time running south with Anna Karina in a stolen car after a murder they may or may not have committed. Pop-art colours, comic books, guns, and an ending with dynamite. Messier than Breathless and more fun.
Melville, Delon, Ventura: the French crime film at its peak
If there’s one director on this list I’d call my favourite, it’s Jean-Pierre Melville. He fought in the Resistance, took his professional name from the author of Moby-Dick, wore a Stetson and dark glasses, and made crime films that move like slow chess. His heroes say almost nothing. They wear trench coats and hats, keep codes nobody else keeps, and lose anyway.
Le Deuxième Souffle (1966, Melville). Lino Ventura as Gu, an old gangster who breaks out of prison for one last job. It’s from a novel by José Giovanni, the ex-convict who’d been sentenced to death after the war and later wrote some of the best French crime fiction of the century. Ventura has the face of a boxer and the stillness of a monk, and once you’ve seen him here you’ll want everything he made.
Le Samouraï (1967, Melville). Alain Delon as Jef Costello, a hit man who lives in a bare room with a caged bird and prepares for a killing the way a priest prepares for Mass. Nobody will ever look cooler in a film than Delon does here, in the hat, adjusting the brim with two fingers. John Woo and Jim Jarmusch have both borrowed from it openly, and half of modern assassin cinema borrows without saying so.
Army of Shadows (1969, Melville). The one I’d save if I could only keep one. A Resistance cell in occupied France, led by Ventura with Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse and Jean-Pierre Cassel. It’s based on Joseph Kessel’s 1943 novel, written during the war itself, and Melville drew on what he’d lived through. There’s no heroism here in the poster sense. People are betrayed, they have to kill their own, and they go on knowing the odds. It’s heavy, cold and magnificent. French critics in 1969 dismissed it as Gaullist, and American audiences didn’t get a proper release until 2006, when it was greeted as a masterpiece.
Le Cercle Rouge (1970, Melville). A jewel heist on the Place Vendôme with Delon, Yves Montand, Gian Maria Volonté and the comedian Bourvil playing it straight as a police commissioner. The robbery itself runs about half an hour with almost no dialogue. You will not breathe.
Un Flic (1972, Melville). Melville’s last film. Delon switches sides and plays a Paris detective, Catherine Deneuve is a nightclub hostess, Richard Crenna is the bank robber. The colours are washed nearly to blue and grey. Not his best, but the train-robbery sequence is pure Melville.
Le Trou (1960, Jacques Becker). Five prisoners in the Santé dig their way out of a cell, and we watch nearly every blow of the hammer. Also from a Giovanni book, also based on a real escape attempt Giovanni himself was part of. Becker died in February 1960, weeks before the film was released, and never saw what audiences made of it. It’s one of the most tense films ever made with almost no music.
The Sicilian Clan (1969, Henri Verneuil). A very fun heist film: Delon, Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura (who’ll become one of your favourites too) in one picture, chasing a jewel collection on a hijacked plane. Ennio Morricone wrote the score, and it’s one of his best. Based on a novel by Auguste Le Breton, who also wrote Rififi.
Borsalino (1970, Jacques Deray). Delon and Belmondo, the two biggest French stars of the day, as small-time crooks who take over 1930s Marseille together. Brawls, gangland deals, good suits, a ragtime theme by Claude Bolling. Lighter than Melville. That’s the point.
Mr. Klein (1976, Joseph Losey). Delon as an art dealer in occupied Paris buying paintings cheap from Jews forced to sell, who finds a Jewish newspaper delivered to his door addressed to him. Someone else with his name exists, and the more Klein looks for him, the more he becomes him. It ends in the Vel d’Hiv roundup of July 1942. Delon’s finest performance, and it won the César for best film.
Buñuel and Lelouch: desire, dreams and the great French romances
Belle de Jour (1967, Luis Buñuel). Deneuve as Séverine, a bored and wealthy Paris housewife who spends her afternoons working in a brothel. It’s a dark, twisted fantasy, and Buñuel keeps you guessing how much of it she’s imagining. The source is Kessel again, his 1928 novel, which tells you how far a novelist’s range can stretch: the same writer gave us Army of Shadows. It won the Golden Lion at Venice.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972, Buñuel). Six well-off friends keep trying to have dinner together and something always stops them: a funeral in the back room, an army on manoeuvres, a dream inside a dream. It’s fun and very trippy, and it won the Oscar for best foreign language film.
The Phantom of Liberty (1974, Buñuel). Even stranger. The film has no main story, just one scene handing off to another, including a dinner party where the guests sit on toilets around the table and excuse themselves to eat in a tiny private room. If Discreet Charm made you laugh, this one will make you laugh harder.
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977, Buñuel). His last film. An older man (Fernando Rey) obsesses over a young woman who never lets him have her, and she’s played by two different actresses, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, switching from scene to scene without explanation. From Pierre Louÿs’ novel La Femme et le pantin. Most people don’t notice the switch for a while, which is the joke.
A Man and a Woman (1966, Claude Lelouch). Possibly the best romantic film ever made. Anouk Aimée is a widowed script girl, Jean-Louis Trintignant is a widowed racing driver, and their children are at the same boarding school in Deauville. That’s about all the plot there is. The rest is Francis Lai’s “dabadabada” theme, rain on windscreens, a beach in winter and the camera switching between colour and black and white. It shared the Palme d’Or and won two Oscars, for foreign language film and original screenplay.
Happy New Year (La Bonne Année) (1973, Lelouch). Lino Ventura as a jewel thief who falls for an antiques dealer (Françoise Fabian) whose shop sits next to the jeweller he plans to rob. It opens with a long excerpt from A Man and a Woman, shown to prisoners in a jail, and then becomes its own tender, grown-up love story with a heist inside it.
Claire’s Knee (1970, Éric Rohmer). A diplomat about to get married spends a summer on Lake Annecy and becomes fixated on touching one teenage girl’s knee. It’s a film about talk, vanity and self-deception, and nothing much happens except that a man learns less about himself than he thinks. Rohmer at his most precise.
César and Rosalie (1972, Claude Sautet). Romy Schneider is Rosalie, torn between César (Yves Montand), a loud, generous scrap-metal dealer, and David (Sami Frey), a quiet artist she loved before. Schneider was never more luminous, and Sautet never lets you take sides for long. If A Man and a Woman is your benchmark for French romance, this is where to go next.
Italy, Sweden, Germany, Spain: the rest of Europe’s golden age
L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni). A young woman vanishes on a volcanic island off Sicily and her friends search for her, then slowly stop searching. Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti drift into an affair instead. Booed at Cannes, then hailed as a turning point in how films could tell a story. Patient viewers only.
Il Sorpasso (1962, Dino Risi). The best Italian road movie. Vittorio Gassman is a loud, charming show-off in an open-top Lancia, Jean-Louis Trintignant is the shy law student he drags along for a ride along the coast on a summer holiday. Funny for most of its length, with an ending that hits like a car door slamming.
8½ (1963, Federico Fellini). Marcello Mastroianni as a famous director who can’t think of his next film, haunted by his women, his Catholic childhood and his producers. Fellini made a film about having nothing to say, and it turned out to be one of the most influential films ever made.
The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti). Burt Lancaster as a Sicilian prince watching his class fade during Garibaldi’s unification of Italy, Alain Delon as his ambitious nephew, Claudia Cardinale as the beauty the nephew marries for money. The ballroom sequence lasts nearly forty-five minutes. It’s adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel, published after his death, and it’s one of the rare cases where the film is as good as a great book. Palme d’Or, 1963.
The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci). Trintignant again, as a weak man in Mussolini’s Italy who joins the secret police to feel normal and is sent to Paris to kill his old professor. Vittorio Storaro’s photography is some of the most beautiful of the decade, all slanting light and enormous fascist halls. From Moravia’s novel, the second Moravia on this list.
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970, Elio Petri). A Rome police chief (Gian Maria Volonté) murders his mistress and leaves clues on purpose, to prove that a man like him can’t be touched. A political satire with another great Morricone score. It won the Oscar for best foreign language film.
Amarcord (1973, Fellini). Fellini’s memories of growing up in Rimini in the 1930s, as a year in the life of a small town: the tobacconist, the uncle up the tree shouting that he wants a woman, the ocean liner passing at night. Warmer and funnier than 8½, and it also won the foreign language Oscar.
Persona (1966, Ingmar Bergman). An actress stops speaking, and the nurse sent with her to a summer house talks and talks until the two women’s faces seem to merge. Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson. Short, strange and endlessly discussed.
Blow-Up (1966, Antonioni). Antonioni’s English-language film, set in swinging London. A fashion photographer (David Hemmings) thinks he’s caught a murder in the background of photographs taken in a park. Based on a Julio Cortázar short story, and it won the Palme d’Or. For anyone who loves cameras, it’s the film about what a photograph can and can’t prove.
Cries and Whispers (1972, Bergman). Three sisters and a maid in a manor house while one sister dies of cancer. The rooms are painted red, and the fades go to red rather than black. Sven Nykvist won the Oscar for its cinematography. Hard to watch, impossible to forget, and in colour terms it belongs in the same conversation as Cherbourg.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog). Klaus Kinski as a Spanish conquistador leading a doomed raft expedition down the Amazon in search of El Dorado. Shot on location in the Peruvian jungle under conditions that nearly killed everyone. The last scene, Kinski alone on a raft overrun by monkeys, is unlike anything else on film.
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973, Víctor Erice). A small Castilian village in 1940, just after the Civil War. A little girl, played by Ana Torrent, sees Frankenstein at a travelling cinema and goes looking for the monster’s spirit. Made under Franco, it says what it couldn’t say out loud through silence and children’s eyes. The most beautiful Spanish film there is.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder). A lonely German cleaning woman in her sixties marries a Moroccan guest worker twenty-odd years younger, and everyone around them turns cold. Fassbinder took the plot of a Douglas Sirk melodrama and made it about racism and loneliness in 1970s Munich. Simple, quick and devastating.
Where to go after this list
Pick a thread and pull it. If Melville hooked you, read the French noir tradition behind him in our post on the shadows and silhouettes of French film noir, then go back to the novels: José Giovanni’s prison books, and Joseph Kessel, whose Army of Shadows and Belle de Jour show how one writer could hand two very different directors two of their best films. If the Italians are more your speed, our piece on giallo, the yellow-covered crime books and the Italian films named after them picks up where Petri and Antonioni leave off.
And if you watch just one this weekend, make it Army of Shadows.