Band of Outsiders

Three young people in Paris — Odile, Arthur and Franz — meet at an English class and are drawn together by a shared taste for crime stories. Arthur and Franz, drifting and dissatisfied, see in Odile a way into an easy score: the suburban house where she works as an au pair for the wealthy Madame Victoria is said to hold a large sum of cash. The three fall into a restless round of friendship, flirtation and jealousy while they wait for the right moment, until pressure from Arthur's family forces them to act sooner than planned.

Jean-Luc Godard directed and wrote the film, the seventh of the twenty-three features he made, following Le Petit Soldat and preceding The Married Woman. Anna Karina plays Odile, with Claude Brasseur as Arthur and Sami Frey as Franz. The film draws on American crime cinema while keeping it at a distance, and it is remembered for its looser, playful passages as much as for the burglary at its centre.

Released in 1964 and running just over an hour and a half, the film holds a 7.6 rating on IMDb from around 29,000 votes and a 7.5 on TMDB from a much smaller number. A critics' rating of 8.7 from 51 reviews places it clearly above those audience scores.