Curator Watchlist
A landmark of French New Wave cinema: intimate, formally inventive, and emotionally alive. Its real-time structure turns a simple waiting period into a vivid meditation on mortality, identity, and the way a city can mirror a state of mind.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 1h 30m
Director: Agnès Varda
Starring: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
Agnès Varda
Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray
A landmark of French New Wave cinema: intimate, formally inventive, and emotionally alive. Its real-time structure turns a simple waiting period into a vivid meditation on mortality, identity, and the way a city can mirror a state of mind.
Cléo from 5 to 7 is one of cinema’s great time-bound portraits, using a single afternoon to chart a woman’s shifting sense of self. What begins as anxious waiting gradually opens into a richer, more humane encounter with the city, with strangers, and with the possibility of seeing herself differently.
Agnès Varda blends documentary texture, street-level observation, and emotional precision with remarkable ease. The film feels light on its feet even as it circles serious dread, and that balance is part of its enduring power.
It’s also a beautiful Paris film without being merely a postcard. The streets, faces, and passing moments all feel alive, and the movie’s real achievement is how it turns uncertainty into something tender, searching, and deeply modern.
maria (4★) · 6022 likes
the perfect movie to watch before the corona test results kick in
matt lynch (5★) · 5910 likes
"Everybody spoils me. Nobody loves me."
James (Schaffrillas) (4★) · 5722 likes
This deserved Oscars for Cinematography and also Supporting Actor for the man who ate 3 frogs and projectile vomited
Sam (3.5★) · 4968 likes
Misleading title but I guess Cleo From 5 to 6:30 wasn't as catchy.
Sally Jane Black · 4431 likes
Ultimately, all you need is one meaningful connection.
A defining French New Wave companion piece with restless energy, street-level Paris texture, and a similarly modern approach to time and character.
Another foundational New Wave film that turns a personal crisis into a vivid urban journey, with emotional immediacy and observational detail.
For viewers drawn to memory, mortality, and intimate existential reflection shaped by a bold modernist structure.
A landmark of modernist cinema that transforms emotional drift and uncertainty into a haunting, contemplative experience.
An elegant, enigmatic study of memory and perception for audiences who like films that feel like a psychological puzzle.
A visually sumptuous French classic that pairs romantic feeling with melancholy and a strong sense of time passing.
A talk-driven, philosophical drama about chance, desire, and self-examination, with a similarly intimate intellectual mood.
Playful, self-aware, and emotionally direct, it shares the New Wave’s interest in female identity and cinematic experimentation.
A precise, emotionally restrained portrait of desire and domestic unease that rewards viewers who like subtle psychological tension.
Agnès Varda’s own later urban meditation, equally interested in modern life, observation, and the poetry of everyday existence.
For its rigorous attention to duration, routine, and the inner life of a woman under pressure.
A fragmented, time-conscious meditation on memory and consciousness that will appeal to fans of formal experimentation.
mortality anxiety, female self-discovery, real-time narrative, urban wandering, identity and performance, existential dread, human connection, art and observation
French New Wave, real-time, existential drama, female protagonist, Paris, 1960s cinema, art-house, coming-of-age, melancholy, modernist