10 Great Movies With 100% Rotten Tomatoes Ratings You Probably Missed

6. L'Atalante

Jean Vigo's masterpiece bears more than a few similarities with F. W. Murnau's own classic Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans - both films tell the story of a married couple who fight, leading the wife to run off into the city to seek out its many pleasures. With L'Atalante, however, the cause of the altercation is more domestic than Sunrise's sinister plot to kill of the wife - a simple flirtation in a cafe is what triggers the spousal rift which causes the wife to abandon the titular canal barge on which they live. L'Atalante is as much about texture and expressionism as it is about narrative, and the film is full of stunning imagery which borders on the poetic. Vigo's masterpiece might have been lost to movie lovers forever were it not for the intervention of the directors of the French New Wave, who recognised its masterful reworking of the potential for cinematic expression. Sadly, Jean Vigo died when he was just 29, depriving the world of more potentially invigorating works of art.