Jean-Luc Godard pushes his exploration of words, sounds and images to vivid new extremes in this complex, dizzying mix of film, essay and collage.

Spinning ever further from his New Wave narrative roots, Godard revisits the approach of his pioneering Histoire(s) du Cinéma in a collaborative venture with Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia and Nicole Brenez. Emerging from a flash storm of spoken and written screen texts, artworks, film and TV clips is a suggestive, polyphonic discourse about the contemporary condition. It takes in those recurrent Godard themes – film history and the Holocaust – as well as an extended contemplation of the Middle East and the West’s incapacity to understand it as anything but an indefinable ‘other’. With a characteristically fragmented soundtrack, including sonic radicals Alfred Schnittke and Scott Walker, this tonic workout for the mind, eyes and imagination shows Godard, at 87, as intransigently and vitally confrontational as ever.

★★★★ "Vast and intricate" The Independent

★★★★ "Rich, disturbing and strange" The Guardian

★★★★ "A work of polarising brilliance" Time Out

This film contains a sequence of flashing lights which might affect customers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.