The 10 best European films: From Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless to Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries

As Britain looks inward, Geoffrey Macnab picks some of the best work from continental filmmakers

Clockwise from top left: ‘Veronika Voss’, ‘Three Colours: Blue’, ‘Breathless’, and ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ (The Criterion Collection/MK2 Distribution/Films Around The World/20th Century Fox)

It’s difficult to believe how exotic and alluring European cinema once seemed to British cinemagoers. Maybe that’s how European movies will appear again now we have left the EU. As we look inward, the work of continental filmmakers will provide us with reassuring, visa-free access to cultures that will suddenly seem very far away.

Those of a nostalgic disposition hark back to a time when European cinema was so often braver, stranger and sexier than its British equivalent. The great auteurs of the postwar years – Agnes Varda (who died last year), François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder among them – changed the way that the British thought not only about European film but about continental Europe itself.

Stars such as Anita Ekberg, Monica Vitti, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Harriet Andersson and Hanna Schygulla seemed wildly glamorous to the British public. Marcello Mastroianni had an air of world-weary sophistication and Max von Sydow a gravitas that few of the UK actors could match. Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo were effortlessly cool.