Happy New Year, reader(s)! Before we get into 2016 in earnest, a small throat-clearing in honour of our masthead mascot from Le Mépris, the centrepiece of the BFI Southbank’s Jean-Luc Godard season, which runs for the next two months. 

It’s easy to scoff at the incomprehension of square old Bosley Crowther, but Le Mépris is still a bitter pill. But so beautiful (the new restoration overflows with colour), and sweetened by Brigitte Bardot and Georges Delerue.

It makes a  certain stripe of cinephile bristle if you ask if Godard is still relevant, and his most recent feature Adieu au Language, which will hopefully be screening in 3D in the season (help me out a bit here, BFI website) gained considerable critical traction in 2014. Here’s a rave from David Bordwell.

Here’s a link to what the BFI website currently does deign to tell us about their Godard season. We note that they are concurrently running a Quentin Tarantino season, and we will be bringing you a review of The Hateful Eight on Friday (is Tarantino still relevant?), so why not leave you with Pauline Kael’s review of JLG’s Bande á Part, a piece of writing cited by QT as a key influence on his film making.