It’s not an overstatement to say that Jean-Luc Godard’s noiry, crime-romance Breathless (À bout de souffle) may be one of the most important films of a very important film era—a game changer. For the film critic turned filmmaker, Breathless Godard’s first feature and it helped to define an exciting new cinema movement that was brewing among young cinephiles in France now known as The French New Wave. With its hand-held photography, jump cutting, improvised script, and natural lighting, it carefully broke many rules of formal cinema. Inspired by American crime films, mostly the B-movies that that generation of the French critics came to appreciate long before their American counterparts, it romanticized the underworld, without the moral lessons of so many similar American movies. The film also gives a shout-out to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur, another film inspired by American Noirs. Playing the film’s lead, a small-time crook with a death wish, Breathless put actor Jean-Paul Belmondo on the map. His gripping and charismatic performance reeks of his influences, most notably Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando. Like so many filmmakers to come, from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino (who both cite Breathless as a major influence), Godard’s work, and Breathless in particular, was a tribute to the movies that came before that the director admired.

Theism has always been a dominating and polarizing subject in philosophy. For the late philosophers who were atheists, their argument against God's existence often clashed with the popular arguments of reason that suggest we all have a soul. The question of whether or not this soul needs salvation cannot ever be answered. Léon Morin, Priest has a character that goes as far as to suggest the need for uncertainty in religion. Without it, the priest claims, there wouldn't be a cause for faith. As in love, he compares devotion to God as merely a “leap of faith”--a belief held by many theists and philosophers. But for Barny, his latest attempt at conversion, one cannot compare the loves of the flesh with that of a Holy spirit.