As she proved in her exquisite debut Love Like Poison, French director Katell Quillévéré has an astonishing knack for delicately told stories which, in their sensitivity to character and credibility, pack a weighty emotional punch. And so it goes in her follow-up Suzanne, an aesthetically sunny story of unconditional familial love and the grand, gut-wrenching folly that comes from being romantically entangled with a dubious character.

Claude Sautet’s gripping noir thriller “Classe Tous Risques”, originally released in 1960,  was an inspiration for Jean-Pierre Melville’s collection of peerless films set in the French underworld. Not surprising, as the script was written by the novelist and ex-cop José Giovanni, who also supplied the story for Melville’s classic “Le Deuxième Souffle”.

Stranger by the Lake is something of a wonder, a superbly made amalgam of Hitchcockian psychological thriller and explicit homoerotica, whose very presence in commercial cinemas defies convention. Yet the sheer quality of Frenchman Alain Guiraudie’s film can’t be denied. Since proving one of the must-sees of Cannes in 2013, where Guiraudie won a directing prize and his film the Queer Palm, it built a word-of-mouth momentum that led to it featuring high on critics’ best-of-year film lists.

You couldn’t imagine The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (****) coming out of anywhere except France. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature vanished for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaida. Guillaume Nicloux’s wry and eccentric comedy, playing in Berlinale’s Forum programme, recycles that legend, only in his film Houellebecq is vanished to a gypsy compound outside Paris where he’s held in circumstances that couldn’t be friendlier.

Whenever someone wants to dispel the gender simplification that female directors only make feelgood films, they wheel out Kathryn Bigelow, whose action movies are cited as being tougher than any man’s. It’s a spurious debate, admittedly, but if we were to play that game I’d definitely bring Denis into Bigelow’s corner. The Frenchwoman doesn’t do action, per se. But her films can be tough as nails, black as pitch, and as disquieting as they are marvellous.

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