Short Cut to Hell is decidely kooky and almost Coenesque. It's hard to watch this and not picture Cage and Goodman in a remake.

It's an effective fatalistic thriller. There is some choice dialogue, and great characterisations. Rivers channels his willingness to kill anyone for money via James Dean - but it's an effective performance. His impotence and loneliness masked by his coldness with a gun. And Johnson takes Doris Day as her template. It makes for an unusual pairing…

Europe must have been in existential crisis in 1967. A lot of the early New Wave films were dark affairs. But they also had a playfulness, a joie-de-vivre, and sense of hope. But in 1967 Bresson gives us the tragedy of Mouchette; Godard went apocalyptic in Weekend. Even Rohmer dripped in toxic masculinity in La Collectionneuse. And in the UK, Losey gives us Accident. It is a brilliant, complex but immensely bleak view of the English middle class. If art…

I go along with the broad critical consensus – that between 1960-1967 Jean-Luc Godard created an incredible body of work: innovative, daring, exciting, controversial, sexy, funny, beautiful, challenging and unique. I want to write these words in red, white and blue capitals. Maybe split them across a page or two: and of course accompany the texts with the sound of a gunshot. That would be Godardian. He created such a distinctive visual style – it becomes difficult to use words…