What more delicious—not to mention cheap—way to pass the dog days of a New York City summer than by taking a vicarious plunge into the French underworld from the safe comfort of an air-conditioned cinema? Starting with the bleak contours of the period preceding the German Occupation and its aftermath's anxious confusion to the stylish rebellion of the New Wave and today's slicker psychological studies, French film directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Becker, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol refashioned the tropes of American B-movies to create enduring masterpieces of good and evil. And if not all 38 noir films and thrillers (spanning six decades) in Film Forum's "French Crime Wave" series are rave-worthy, each is rich in defining the moments and ironies of our ongoing struggle against those terrifying yet fascinating unseen forces... More >>>