No Godard film was more controversial. This startling modernisation of the Annunciation and Nativity stories, depicting the Virgin Mary as the basketball-playing daughter of a gas-station manager, and Joseph as her jealous taxi-driver boyfriend, was met with bans, bomb threats, protests, and a papal condemnation!

Not that the detractors had actually seen the film. Hail Mary, far from being sacrilegious, approaches its subject with a palpable sense of reverence and awe—The New Yorker​’s David Denby called it ​“one of the most radiant and tenderly religious movies ever made.” The film now seems very much in keeping with the spiritual, transcendental bent of Godard’s work in the 1980s and ​’90s. Some critics of the day were left wondering ​“if Godard is yet another iconoclast with the wits scared out of him by the approach of the abyss” (Harlan Jacobson, Film Comment).

In French with English subtitles.