A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments. While trapped, the car he’d parked across the street has been taken by a leather-jacketed young tough who brings his girlfriend from a florist’s along for the joyride.

Directed by a Frenchmen, Foxfire adapts an American book to create a film with an archetypical stance and setting which could rank it alongside The Outsiders, Stand by Me or even Rebel Without a Cause. The problem is that despite depicting a passionate, wayward and issue-fuelled gang, Foxfire is not animated enough. It unfolds in deliberate steps, like a stage play. The young women may be on fire, but the measured approach of the overlong film tempers their spirit.

Jean Cocteau, who died 50 years ago today, was a poet/novelist /playwright /film director/designer/painter/stage director/ballet producer/patron/myth-maker/friend of the great/raconteur/wit. A Jacques of all trades and master of all. “Etonne-moi!” (“Astonish me!”) were the words with which Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, challenged Cocteau. The result was the ballet Parade (1917), designed by Pablo Picasso, composed by Erik Satie, and set to a scenario by Cocteau. The latter continued to astonish ever after.

One of the most mystifying of working relationships is that between an artist and model. For any sitter the experience must be tiring, if not tiresome, but for the artist their compliance is as integral as paint or clay; one may become famous, while the other remains anonymous, the silent partner in a work of art; there’s also the fact that, in the most common permutation, the arrangement involves a man staring for hours at a naked woman, without reproach – and where else can you find that? Well, filmmaking.

It’s always irritating being told “you had to be there”. Even more irksome is when some author, film director or nostalgic creative decides to record – naturally, they “fictionalise” it – their contribution to some golden era or significant event for posterity. Whether they’re being truthful, bigging themselves up or playing fast and loose with history is beside the point. They’re saying they were there. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air is the French director and writer’s entry in the canon and, shockingly, it’s great.

It’s great because Assayas has thoughtfully crafted a rich, universally resonant tableau. The turbulent France of May ’68 (the French title is Après Mai – see overleaf for a taste of the real Mai ‘68) is the jumping off point for a narrative centring on the Assayas analogue Gilles (Clément Métayer) and his interaction with a cast of middle-class characters embracing and then retreating from the preoccupations of the time. Some are earnest politicos or revolutionaries. Others are selfish hedonists or would-be careerists inevitably heading towards lives of responsibility. Central to Gilles's world is the torch he holds for the ethereal Laure (Carole Combes) and his relationship with the more earth-bound Christine (Lola Créton). Much of Something in the Air’s impact stems from its eye for accurate period detail. The music chosen is wonderful. Assayas had said that as he was there, he took control of the film’s look and props. Even so, Gilles’s hair is more poufed-up than anyone’s would have been back then – beyond Brylcreem, or whatever the French version was, male hair product wasn’t quite so wide-ranging in the late Sixties.

The DVD extras add little to an appreciation of the film. A making-of film features on-set footage punctuated by Assayas offering truisms to camera. A separate filmed interview gives him the chance to do so again, but in English this time. The must-see is footage of the light show created for the film’s concert sequences.

Something in the Air says nothing original – people move on, the world changes, causes aren’t necessarily forever – but says it persuasively and with sensitivity. File alongside Barbet Schroeder’s poignant duo of contemporaneously made films More and La Vallée, and even Withnail and I.

Overleaf: Watch the police storm the Sorbonne in Paris in May 1968

Cinema sometimes seems to have left the Age of Aquarius behind. The filmmakers who came of age in the Sixties have long since said what they needed to, and nowadays the decade’s evanescent aura feels confined to 50th anniversaries of the likes of Billy Liar and The Leopard. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air plunges us right back in as it which harks longingly back to the heady days of the soixante-huitards when apparently, for those who were there, it seemed possible the world could be fashioned anew.

A female hiker is naked. A village is close. Lying on the slope down to a river, she invites the taciturn man she’s followed to have sex. They do. She begins shrieking and foaming at the mouth. He fastens his face to hers. She could then be dead yet begins crawling into the water, looks heavenwards and spreads her arms.

There is an arresting moment towards the start of In the House when a character looks the camera – and by extension, the audience - directly in the eye. A warm trusting face and a slight squint hint at vulnerability (see clip below). His name is Rafa, and he is the best friend of Claude, who regularly visits Rafa's house after school to help him with his maths. But we soon learn that Claude’s furtive intention is to infiltrate an ideal suburban home as part of an observational writing assignment.

Inevitably, in box sets collecting the works of a single director one film will overshadow the others. So it is with the four discs of The Claire Denis Collection, where 2009’s White Material expresses the temperament, texture and compositional style of a Denis film more effectively than its three companions. This doesn’t mean that White Material should be watched first, or that it’s better than Chocolat (1988), Nénette et Boni (1996) or Beau Travail (1999), just that it is the finest distillation of Denis to date.

By declaring that You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet wasn’t his final film, the 89-year-old Alain Resnais might have been acknowledging his lack of a fixed relationship with time and memory, his continual exploration of their interchangeabilty. In his mind, final could mean anything at any given moment. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking he might pack it in and this would become his last. His next film is already in production.