Godard went full-on Maoist (and pretty much off his rocker) between 1968-73, and those films are good examples that nutwingdom isn't confined to the right. His films from 1975 on are difficult and confusing but a very different beast (there are still some political elements, but they're no longer so stridently…

Ha, I love Weekend, but it is a super-aggressive attack on everything you'd expect to make up a film. The rest of his pre-1967 vary in quality and likeability but all are far less "middle-finger to the audience" than Weekend.

It might not, but region-free DVD players have become increasingly cheap and commonplace. Yours may even be region-free and you wouldn't know it!

The UK DVD import is your best (and really, only) bet. Here's Amazon.

Just don't let Godard find out! The poor, foolish producer of Sympathy for the Devil kept trying to recut the film so there'd be a full performance of the title song at the end (and thus he'd actually have something to market). Eventually he got Godard on a stage where he wanted to show the two alternate versions of…

A lot of these (or see the list below for more) are available from Criterion on Hulu (with no commercials!), so that's an easy way to start even with a laptop.

There's a good AV Club Gateway to Geekery from back in the day. But for a quick introduction to the French New Wave Top 10:

And then New Yorker died. Again. So Celine and Julie is stuck under their corpse until the rights expire or someone in charge there (if there is anyone there) figures out what Kickstarter is.

Rivette is imposing because of the length of his films, but there's a lot more richness to his characters than to Godard's. The films can start slow and it can take a bit to get on Rivette's wavelength, but there's lots of improvisation and things rarely stay dull long. I'd strongly recommend giving Celine and Julie,…

The 400 Blows is the easiest next step, and not exhaustingly arty at all. Truffaut's early films are the best entry point, as they're fun and creative but not "arty" like Godard, who's much more divisive (your mind will be blown or you'll be bored to death). Chabrol is a good follow-up if you like Hitchcock—a lot of…

It doesn't help that Rivette's work is by far the hardest of the New Wave to find. A good deal of his stuff has never been released on DVD at all, let alone in the states (Out 1 and a couple other films finally got a UK release this month.) His most accessible (in both meanings of the word) films are Celine and Julie…

Select scenes from Young Mr. Lincoln are among the best Ford ever made, but it's bogged down by that awful Sherlock Holmes ripoff—err, trial.

I've always felt Fort Apache's ending is portraying the mythologizing of the West (and Wayne's character is covering the army's ass in delivering their version), while the rest of the film proves the ending (and thus that mythology) is bullshit. The obvious parallel is Custer, who had long been seen as a tragic hero…

I mean, Tora Tora Tora was literally a co-production with Japan. The Japanese scenes had a Japanese director and screenwriter, and Toho co-produced it with Fox. So it was always going to include a lot of the Japanese perspective, even if its one that mostly aligns with the US view of the war (hence the focus on…

It helps that the Japanese made half of Tora, Tora, Tora.

Hurricanes are New Orleans's tourist trap drink of choice (followed by Hand Grenades). The city enjoys the irony.

He was brought on to play against Vincent Price when he hosted, and didn't get much play thereafter. But yeah, he's probably this show's biggest success.

I'd never heard any version Last Christmas until Ashley Tisdale released a cover in 2006 and now every year it's on me like the Furies. I can stand the Wham! original, but the Tisdale version, with her faux-precious almost lispy delivery, makes me run screaming.

God, does Last Christmas even have verses? *shudder*

That's a line of thought that goes back at least to Bazin, who compared filming something to embalming it. Film can't recreate reality, but it can preserve it, creating something that is both real and unreal, both alive and dead.