BD, pronounced bédé, is short for "bande déssinée", the French equivalent of the comic-strip or graphic novel, which has long been accorded a popular affection and cultural standing well beyond that of its anglophone equivalent. Luc Besson says he was weaned on BD, which comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with his films. The only surprise is that it has taken him so long to direct an adaptation of one.

After a trio of harsh modern pictures dealing with the pitfalls of globalisation - Demonlover, Clean, and Boarding Gate - the director Olivier Assayas felt the need to write a more personal, reflective screenplay around the time Paris’s Musée d’Orsay invited him to make a film using artefacts from its collection to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its opening.

High summer in Paris. Jazz plays on the soundtrack, the boulevards are bright, leafy and humming and Grégoire, a good-looking man in his mid-forties, scuttles along the street, mobile phone glued to ear. He's troubleshooting on a truly international scale: the Koreans are arriving mob-handed, the Georgians are so demanding and that nutty Swedish director's budget is spiralling out of control. Grégoire is a movie producer, and Father of My Children starts out as a light-hearted, slightly madcap addition to the capacious genre of films about film-making.

"I like directors whose style you recognise right away: Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Emir Kusturica, David Lynch," asserts Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a statement which should surprise none of his followers. Fabled for its attention to minutiae, his work is honed down to the last millimetre, from the immaculately choreographed sight gags to the hyperstylised sets. Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children (both co-directed with Marc Caro), Amelie, A Very Long Engagement, even Jeunet's Stygian contribution to the Alien franchise, are instantly, unmistakably recognisable as his. "If a certain detail isn't in the perfect place, a sequence doesn't work," he says.

Jacques Audiard's A Prophet arrives in Britain laden with plaudits (Best Film at the London Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize in Cannes and a fistful of superlative reviews). Here, in the first of a series of illustrated masterclasses, in which leading directors introduce clips from their work, Audiard reveals the secrets of how he shot two of A Prophet's memorable scenes.

Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday in Paris aged 89, was famed for elegant, literate, yet profoundly romantic and erotic dramas such as La Collectionneuse, My Night With Maud and Claire's Knee; and for a style that helped define the French Nouvelle Vague and that he pursued with distinction in some 50 films over the next half century (his last, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon was made two years ago).