Alphaville

Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) is available to watch online on iFILM. Godard built his dystopia with no effects at all: the future is just nighttime Paris of the 1960s, and the distant space city is its concrete corridors and neon signs.

Secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) arrives in Alphaville, a city ruled by the computer Alpha 60. The machine has outlawed love, poetry, and even the word for tenderness, executing anyone who still feels. Caution's orders are to find and kill Professor von Braun, who created the computer. Along the way he falls for von Braun's daughter Natacha, played by Anna Karina, whose face carries all the film's chill. Noir, detective thriller, and science fiction fold into one.

The film took the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and became a cornerstone of the French New Wave. It rewards viewers who like cinema of ideas: Godard wrestles with language, power, and technology decades before that became fashionable. Stream Alphaville (1965) online on iFILM.