Films don’t come more exciting than Breathless, one of the defining examples of French New Wave cinema by one of the country’s greatest directors: Jean-Luc Godard. For a limited period this irredeemably cool Gallic flic will be screened in UK cinemas, and it’s another one that has to be caught while you can.

It was in Breathless that Godard most clearly stood by his mantra that, to make a good film, all you need is a girl and a gun. The story is a simple on of a crook on the run who goes looking for lovely, liberated ladies from his past with whom to while away some time as he lies low. Needless to say that his fast-lived lifestyle soon catches up with him…

The most fantastic thing about Godard, and Breathless especially, is that he manages to make everything he points the camera at look fantastic: and do so with apparently no effort.

Of course, making your film look good is one heck of a lot easier with actors like Jean-Paul Belmondo in front of the camera. With the benefit of hindsight, we see in Belmondo (and his Breathless alter-ego Michel Poiccard) the sleek French lethario who came to define the light and fun side of the French New Wave. His ability to live in the moment drags the audience into it with him in a way that scriptwriters dream of doing with their dialogue. But at the time he was very much the unconventional leading man: he was shorter than your usual star, and not conventionally attractive, but somehow conveyed a certain mesmeric magnetism. In a sense, he epitomised all that the New Wave stood for.

Alongside him was the stunning Jean Seberg as Patricia Franchini, the lady who occupies Michel’s affections for the duration of the tale. Displaying a coquettish sexuality, Seberg defined Patricia as that wonderfully liberated lady who would become far ore ubiquitous in the 1960s, but without the overtly political overtones that would later dominate both this character archetype, and the work of Godard.

There are so many reasons to watch Breathless again on the big screen. It’s the opening salvo of one of the most exiting movements in cinematic history, it’s the beginning of the career of one of the medium’s greatest directors, and it stands at a cultural crossover point which oozes its own unique charm. As if these reasons weren’t enough: it’s also a heck of a lot of fun.