Alphaville

An agent travels to a city where emotion and poetry are forbidden. A computer runs it, and words are deleted from the dictionary daily. The film builds no science fiction sets: nineteen-sixties Paris shot at night is used directly as the future, with light and editing as the only effects. The narrative keeps a hardboiled detective and a computer that speaks like a textbook in the same scene, and the strangeness is the point. Jean-Luc Godard directed, with Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin. Who it's for: those who like formal experiment and low budget science fiction. Who it's not for: viewers waiting for the narrative to move; the film stops to read poetry.