Jules and Jim

François Truffaut made Jules and Jim in 1962, three years after The 400 Blows launched the French New Wave. Adapted from Henri-Pierre Roché's autobiographical novel about a love triangle that spanned the First World War, the film became almost immediately one of the canonical works of the Nouvelle Vague (alongside Godard's Breathless and Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Two best friends) the gentle Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner) and the worldly Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre), meet in pre-war Paris and fall in love with the same woman, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau, in the role that sealed her international stardom). The triangle survives the war, multiple marriages, a daughter, and decades of partial reconciliations, but ultimately resolves itself with a finality the film delivers with a startling speed. Raoul Coutard's restless camera and Georges Delerue's score (the famous Le Tourbillon, sung by Moreau) define the film's signature joy-and-melancholy register.

The film's view of Catherine (a woman whose impossibility is celebrated as freedom and lamented as cruelty in roughly equal measure) has been re-evaluated repeatedly across the decades. What is not in dispute is Moreau's performance, the camera's love for her, and Truffaut's mastery of the form he was, with this film, helping to invent. Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas and Noah Baumbach have all named it among their formative encounters with cinema.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: One of the films that taught modern cinema how to be in love with movement, with friendship, and with women. Sixty years on, Le Tourbillon still works exactly as Truffaut intended.