Rating: 
Summary: Excellent portrayal...
Review: of where we've more or less ended up. Alphaville isn't a real city, unlike New York, it's a soulless abstract place run by computers, everything run by computers, kinda like microsoft or this place where you are buying your book, amazon.com. The moral of this story is that in this world of increasing technological power, the first world country's inhabitants are losing the simple ability to love. It is a simple thing, and this movie portrays it well, but it is so precious and rare.
Rating:
Summary: More on that Aspect Ratio
Review: On the aspect ratio. I think Steve Rose, below, is absolutely right. I have the widescreen VHS and the Criterion DVD and have run them together and the DVD is obviously giving the full print image. The W/screen tape is only widescreen because it crops the top and the bottom of the image, giving a very cramped composition to every shot. The DVD has a precision of framing that is always spot-on (as one would expect from Raoul Coutard). Not only that but the VHS tape is washed out; it lacks strong blacks, and has next to no contrast - an important feature in a film that is an hommage to American film noir. The DVD is, all up, a model of care and committment to a wonderful movie. Now we can see it as Godard intended. (In particular, we can again see clearly that the synchronised swimmers are stabbing the executed men to death - something that is not obvious on the VHS tape.) This DVD is still listed as widescreen long after they have had it pointed out to them that it is not! As are many of the other films. Buyer beware!)The film itself probably needs no further introduction. It is a beautiful and sad *comedy* on humanity and Humanism, touched, as all Godard's films of this period were, by his tangible love for Anna Karina - whom he photographs as if he were trying to remember forever. The poetry of Paul Eluard is used to wonderful effect in her awakening, and the film is filled with brilliant visual humour - like the swimmers, mentioned above. A stunning film, and one that seems even more daring and original now than it did when it came out - a sad reflection on the current state of cinema, where even alternative films are trying so hard to please.
Rating:
Summary: WHAT??? I can't give more than 5 measly stars? Whadda rip.
Review: One of the two greatest science fiction films ever made. (Read all of my reviews to figure out the other.) A near perfect visual and conceptual feast, an iconic figure in Eddie Constantine's Lemmy Caution, a perfect blend of the 20th century's great genres S.F. and the detective novel. (Not that Lemmy does much detecting, but, hey, its the spirit of the thing.) Heavy sub-text on the importance of words. Bet Noam Chomsky would like it if he saw it. Obligatory absent DVD complaint: Germany 90 Nine Zero, effectively the sequal as Lemmy Caution returns to a post-wall Berlin. I have a bootleg VHS and that is NOT sufficient.
Rating: 
Summary: What a horrific waste of time...
Review: Over 100 minutes of the most boring, pretentious, pointless film ever shot. Incomprehensible, muddling dialogue that sounds as if it was dictated by a drunken, homeless bum. Uninteresting, somnolent characters. Atrocious film editing, and a non-existent plot.
How DARE someone create a movie like this, and call it art? How DARE the dilletantes who give this pile of steaming cinematic offal five stars defend it?
The only film I can compare this to, in terms of utter pointlessness and sheer boredom- is the fifteen minutes of unexposed film that I accidentally fed into a projector back in my junior year of college.
The Emporer wears no clothes- and Alphaville needs to be consigned to the scrapheap of cinematic disasters, where it so richly deserves to lie, moldering and forgotten.
Rating:
Summary: Amazonian sensitivity
Review: Please note that one sentence of the review below has been edited by Amazon so that it no longer makes sense. The point of the last sentence of the first paragraph was that Amazon - not Criterion - still list this DVD as widescreen long after the viewer reviews have pointed out that it isn't. Touchy folk!
Rating:
Summary: Sci-Fi Critique
Review: Predating Blade Runner by two decades, this film has many chilling parallels between our current modern society and the Paris that Goddard saw creeping through De Gaule's influence. This is one of the best meditations on communication and technology that still remains timeless and troubling.
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Summary: Might help us catch up a little with Godard!
Review: Published screenplays should be as irrelevant to the film lover as instructions on the side of self-raising flour are to the gourmet. At best, their interest is limited to scholars and researchers. In the case of Jean-Luc Cinema Godard, however, they are a godsend. Godard's films are so dense, even simply on the verbal level, with allusions, philosophical ideas, aphorisms, puns, complex jokes etc., it is impossible to take them all in during a single viewing. Publishing a screenplay like 'Alphaville' (a sci-fi/detective thriller in which a totalitarian, technocratic regime run by a HAL-like computer is overthrown not by weapons or physical skill, but by a book of Surrealist poetry (Eluard's 'La capitale de la douleur')) is therefore invaluable, and allows us to return to the film more open to its visual astonishments. As was common with the director, Godard didn't actually work from a completed script; this verbatim transcript from the finished film was originally made to facilitate sub-title work. This edition contains a fine introduction by French cinema specialist Richard Roud, explaining some of Godard's visual sources and the 'ethical' meaning of his stylistic choices (the circle is evil, etc.); over 30 stills and photos from production; and Godard's original treatment (entitled 'A new Lemmy Caution Adventure'), which is fascinating to compare with the finished masterpiece, as well as revealing how completely different the concepts 'story' and 'mise-en-scene' are for Godard.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: The fact that Godard espoused strong socialist beliefs soon after this film was made boggles my mind. If I have ever seen a film which exemplifies individualism, this is it. Amazing cinematography and story line. The music is also quite moving and builds with the climax of the film. See it.
Rating: 
Summary: WONDERFUL CINEMATOGRAPHY!!!
Review: The film was absolutely magnificent with its surrealistic settings and charismatic characters. The film was a little hard to follow though. One can understand that a computer controls a society of people but it is hard to comprehend what the relevency of the chain of events leading up to the dramatic climax holds.
Rating:
Summary: Beware the voice of the computer
Review: There is a lot to love about the mysterious Alphaville, and Criterion does a good job with the material... however be forewarned about the low burping croak that is the voice of Alpha 60. It REALLY can get on your nerves, and once this thing starts talking, it never shuts up. It's so loud in the soundtrack that it can rumble you right off the couch where you were about to fall asleep. Nonetheless the film is a masterpiece. For the unfamiliar I'd recommend this movie be watched in small doses.
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