Get Your Godard

Also recommended, this time for people nostalgic for the hippie disorders and fractured politics of 1968, Jean-Luc Godard’s eerily prophetic and spectacularly stylized avant-garde dialectic La Chinoise (1967) with Jean-Pierre Léaud, Anne Wiazemsky, Michael Semeniako, Juliet Berto and Lex de Bruijn (as Sergei Kirilov). The infinite variety of dissent and revisionism around the world is batted around here by Godard in his multifaceted Mao period. I once asked Mr. Léaud on one of his visits to New York to tell me point-blank who was his best and favorite director. After a long interval of serious thought on his part, he said at last and decisively, GODARD! And this from an actor who had been discovered as a child and cinematically nurtured into adulthood by Francois Truffaut (1932-1984). Film Forum: October 10-18.