"Let's assume, then, that they go outside and push the button again. This time the series of messages is different: This is attempt 2 of 50. Distance 391km. Access Denied. Powering off..."

"Type Eu into a French search engine and you are more likely to get the past participle of the verb avoir, to have, than the estimable château, hotels, restaurants and gardens of the ancient royal borough. For English surfers, Eu predictably retrieves a long list of European Union websites." [...] "Now Marie-Françoise Gaouyer, the Mayor of Eu, wants to add extra syllables to make the town more internet-visible."

The film that the Small Town Anywhere social game was based on; the power and freedom of anonymous letters, and how cheaply you can fake omniscience. Fun to see how well and how quickly the Small Town organisers had cast the players.

"Je te vois venir avec tes gros sabots - Now we are finally getting to the point (literally: 'I see you coming with your big clogs')."

Turning Mont Saint-Michel into an enormous sundial.

A Hitchcock, but not really having any of his style to it; Cary Grant being an irked ex-jewel-thief trying half-heartedly to clear his name from recent crimes, whilst wearing an alarming mahogany-varnish suntan.

Back-and-forth lineage politics at an anachronistic 12th century Christmas, with everyone complimenting their enemies on how good they are at it. Some great lines of dialogue, and a lot of wonderfully bad.

A slow and dark Hitchcockian murder mystery, with the mystery in unexpected places. A good strong twist at the end, and an even better title card telling the audience not to give away spoilers when talking to their friends about it.

"All these pictures are 360° panoramas projected to look like small planets."

A light and pointlessly elaborate art-forgery heist, pulled off by a reluctant but obligingly over-prepared Peter O'Toole.

Half-watched. David Niven being nonchalant in a ridiculous collar, with a few particularly clever flourishes of bluff and subtle psychology.

The French space programme holds a tourist lottery to raise funding, and one of the winners takes the space station hostage. Some absurdly throwaway joke scenes, and nicely lost-in-translation running gags. Had forgotten how odd French comedies could be.

Suicide as romanticised and misunderstood exhaustion. One good simile, horribly over-diluted at two hours.

"On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB [driven] at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit."

Entertainingly casual deflation of the murder mystery, every guilty character confessing immediately and nobody really caring.

"The site also explains how to inject wild-mushroom flavour into duck, make a 'wine sauce' with a violet-coloured powder, add a zest of bottled scallop to scallop tagliatelli, and spray saffron perfume on to a marzipan turnover."

Like watching someone else playing a fun but linear driving-and-shooting video game. And apparently skipping through a lot of cutscenes.

Secrets and surveillance, with a nice sense of the audience being shifted and positioned as if they were the camera, and a subtle ending that's invisible on tiny aeroplane screens, it turns out.

"Raymond Martinot and his wife were the toast of the world cryonics movement. [...] The couple's bodies were removed from their faulty freezer and cremated this week. Under French law a corpse must be buried, cremated or formally donated to science."

Calmly socio-political zombie film, reintegrating the muted and sonambulist dead into service and manufacturing industries, while families try to make sense of things. A slow and bloodless progression that's not quite worth it, but a good atmosphere.

Parisian beekeeping. "The urban biotope is completely artificial, but a lot more varied than in the countryside. There are dozens of different species, and there is something in flower from April to October."

A vague and rural post-apocalypse, towns being locked down as fresh food and water run out, and unlucky wanderers clashing and coalescing. Rebooting society, and children being the future because they're so evolutionarily gullible.

Parisian lawyer having her flat rebuilt by immigrant workers, at the mercy of an overenthusiastic architect and vague romantic-comedy cliche, all made a bit more bearable for being French.

Activists deflating the tyres of Parisien 4x4s, and spraying them with mud. "Mais la mauvaise surprise n'était pas dans le message, elle se trouvait dans leurs pneus... à plat."

The mysteries and vagaries and pit-traps of literary biography - slightly too random musings on Flaubert, stitched together with not quite as much narrative as it looked like it was going to have.

A blankly-frustrated welder walks away from a mundane life in rural France to wander around Venice. Feels like two completely unconnected films, and that we don't really see any genuine perspective from him. Good range of pick-your-own metaphors, though.

Complex networks of one-way attention, and the hidden motives of them, and how not to change them. Most characters end up being slightly too unlikeable as a result, though.

A couple meeting again nine years after a brief thing, wandering around Paris and looking at where the future's left them. Mediocre one-voice American dialogue, for the most part, but nice lighting.

A Polish barber understatedly "down on his luck" flees from Paris with only a comb and a suitcase, to rebuild his life back home. The ascent is patchier than the descent, but it's all good, the whiteness of the set design is quietly all-pervading.

Understated and impossibly charming documentary, quietly watching a tiny, one-room school in rural France for six months, with no commentary. Fun to watch a film with foreign dialogue simple enough to pre-empt it from the subtitles.

Perfectly-balanced, luxuriously-paced look at the boundaries of people's opinions, and how easy and difficult and doomed and liberating it can be to adopt arbitrary ones.

"Combined view of 50 photos on Flickr tagged with "Eiffel". Each photo is from a different user."

Magnificent wooden-shelled social robots. "By observing the audience's interaction with the bots and the effects the bots have on the audience, we are able to make adjustments and "teach" the bots different behaviors."

An urban climber scales the Montparnasse Tower in forty-five minutes, sans rope.

Another journalist visits. "Oh, people open their skulls on the ceilings or they trip and hurt their ankles, but there is only one death we know for certain. Philibert Aspairt. Two hundred years ago."

Running with the cataphiles: "The whole map is a giant Photoshop file that he has printed in Switzerland. While it's black and white, it shows over six levels. Stephane dreams of producing a colour-coded version."

Update on the Parisian cinema: "The biggest hassle was that everything - tables, chairs, bar, projector, screen, the lot - had to fit through a 30cm by 40cm hole on the surface."

Classic artwork reproduced as graffiti in Parisian underpasses.

"Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement."

A giant hypercube in Paris, mentioned on R4 the other morning, that I'd never noticed.

"Many of these sauces [...] are in reality, variations on a theme - change one ingredient and Sauce A becomes Sauce B. By applying a bit of imagination, it is possible to see the recipes as elements of a matrix rather than individual prescriptions."

Destruction from the Siege and Commune of Paris, 1870.

"By the time the last volume was published, more than 140 people had contributed articles to its pages. In the same spirit, this website is a collaborative effort of volunteer translators."

On MP3s:- "How can you love a record that arrives so easily? [...] Even if music was my only love, it was a permanent fight to get it into my arms."

Video clips of Patrick in Paris, from last November.