Six Moral Tales

Six brief affairs of the mind, from one of cinema's great moral philosophers. Éric Rohmer, a founding critic of Cahiers du cinéma, spent the 1960s and early '70s turning his ideas about cinema into film with this series of six stories about temptation and self-deception. Each entry follows a man already committed to one woman who finds himself drawn toward another, only to talk himself back to the first — Rohmer's interest lying less in what his characters do than in the elaborate reasoning they use to justify it. Shot with an understated, naturalistic eye and narrated in a wry first-person voice, the films move from the two black-and-white shorts that opened the series to the lush, seasonally-set features that followed, cementing Rohmer as one of the New Wave's most distinct and influential voices.