Nouvelle Vague: Films of the French New Wave

There was cinema before the French New Wave, and there was cinema after. The explosion of creative innovation that emerged from France in the late 1950s and early ’60s forever altered the course of film history by opening up new avenues of stylistic experimentation and trumpeting the concept of the “auteur” director, whose aesthetic vision and thematic obsessions took centre stage. 

Led by a band of passionate, young film critics and cinephiles who took up cameras, the French New Wave inspired filmmakers around the world by liberating cinema from commercial demands and reclaiming it in the name of unfettered personal expression. - Criterion