Beau Travail

Sight and Sound's 'Top 100 Greatest Films of all time' is the critics poll the magazine takes each decade with more than 1,600 critics, to test the temperature of what is considered a classic!

This year, we will screen one of the choices from the poll each month, as part of our new Sunday Classics series. At the screenings, we invite you to join the conversation and vote for YOUR own classic, which we'll screen at the end of 2024 as part of our very own Audience Poll! 

Beau Travail by Claire Denis features in the critics poll at Number 7! Set in the eerily beautiful African desert and featuring an eclectic soundtrack boasting music by Neil Young and Benjamin Britten, Beau Travail is Denis’s extraordinarily beautiful adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, exploring the exclusively masculine world of the near-mythical French Foreign Legion.

Directed by French film director and screenwriter, Claire Denis, Beau Travail has been called one of the greatest films of the 1990s and of all time. As one of the two female directors who will feature in our Classic Sundays greatest films of all time poll, this is a reminder that the female gaze is still underrepresented in film lists and awards.

This film is F-Rated. The F-Rating is applied to all films which are directed by women and/or written by women. Find out more about F-Rating.

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