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.

Not-long into this farrago, Peter – the former Pete - Doherty opines that “nothing is beyond romance, except for the pain that is killing me every day”. Thankfully, the pain here is limited to the close-to two hours that Confession of a Child of the Century takes to trudge towards its conclusion.

Although it's impossible to place yourself in the shoes of audiences seeing these other-worldly short films at the dawn of the 20th century, the reaction they provoke now cannot be that different. Delight, surprise and then amazement. These films were meant to be magical, and remain so. Taking 19th century theatre in all its forms, capturing it on film and making it even more unreal with hand tinting and editing resulted in a unique strand of cinema.

Begun in 1943 and released in 1945, Les Enfants du paradis, which unfolds in two acts – the first frantic, the second slow – in Paris’s theatre quarter in the 1820s and ’30s, is regarded as the crowning glory of director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert’s fertile partnership.

The third sensitive feature written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve is a semi-autobiographical realist drama about a young woman making the agonising emotional transition many endure after their initial romance. It gives little away to disclose that at the start of Goodbye, First Love, 15-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) is in the process of being devirginised by her boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and that at the end she is in a settled relationship with another man.

Although only a couple of shots are fired in Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion, its stature as one of the greatest of anti-war films is unquestioned; perhaps only All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957) are comparable.