Louis Malle began his prolific career with a deep-sea documentary, “The Silent World,” co-directed by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He ended it with scenes from Forty-Deuce in 1994’s “Vanya on 42nd Street” (June 26). In between, he made stars – notably Jeanne Moreau, who made four films with the director, and Brooke Shields, who at 12 starred as a child prostitute in his notorious first American film, 1978’s “Pretty Baby” (July 8 & 14).

His expansive oeuvre also boasts a potty-mouthed 10-year-old, a multipart documentary on India, mother-son incest, a talking unicorn, and Nazi-occupied France. “When people say, ‘You’ve made all those films in so many different directions, what do they have in common?’ All I can answer is ‘Me,'” the director said. The Walter Reade’s near complete, 28-film retrospective, “Risks and Reinvention: The Cinema of Louis Malle,” which runs through July 19, richly proves just how many multitudes Malle contained.

Malle was born in 1932 in Thumeries, France, and died in 1995. “The Lovers” (June 26, 27 & 29), Malle’s second film with Ms. Moreau – following his seductive, noirish first solo feature “Elevator to the Gallows” (June 24) – was the first to court scandal. Jeanne (Ms. Moreau) abandons her husband, daughter, and polo-playing lover for Bernard (Jean-Marc Bory), a young archaeologist she’d just met that day.

“I’ve known you forever. I’ve known only you,” Jeanne purrs to Bernard. According to Hugo Frey, author of “Louis Malle” (Manchester University Press), the director “is accredited with being responsible for providing the first filmic representation of a female orgasm.” In any case, Jeanne and Bernard’s love scenes irked censorship boards worldwide and even led to the arrest of one Cleveland movie-theater owner. Almost 50 years after its release, “The Lovers” still shimmers.

Yet Malle was equally a master of unflinching, occasionally disturbing looks into youthful sexuality, as three wildly divergent films from the 1970s attest. Laurent (Benoit Ferreux), the 15-year-old, jazz-mad smarty-pants protagonist in “Murmur of the Heart” (1971), reads Camus and wards off the assaults of his sadistic older brothers. Diagnosed with a delicate ticker, he is whisked away by his doting maman, Clara (Lea Massari), to a spa for a “rest cure.” Mother and son share a guiltless night together: “We’ll remember it as a beautiful moment. It will be our secret,” Clara coos to Laurent. Malle makes the transgression look neither icky nor sticky.

It’s hard to know what to make of the intergenerational and interspecies carnal acts in Malle’s Alice in Wonderland-inspired freakout “Black Moon” (July 9 & 11). Teenage Lily (Cathryn Harrison) flees a firing squad in a bizarre, post-apocalyptic war between the sexes, ending up in a loony mansion housing a bedridden old woman (Therese Giehse) and her two mute children, played by Alexandra Stewart and Warhol hunk Joe Dallesandro. Lily offers her breast to be suckled by both the old lady and a unicorn, while a gaggle of naked children form a cult devoted to a sow. Suggesting a nutso hybrid of Bergman’s “Shame” and Jacques Demy’s “Donkey Skin,” Malle’s dystopic bafflement is unapologetically outre from start to finish. Don’t miss it.

But the creepy “Pretty Baby” makes incest and bestiality look positively benign. Pubescent Brooke Shields, all limbs and fervent determination, displays not the slightest bit of discomfort in the most provocative scenes: being offered to the highest bidder, who will get to deflower her and posing nude for photographer E.J. Bellocq (Keith Carradine), who will soon take her as his child bride.

Sexuality is just one thread to be followed through this retrospective, however. There are many others, and “Murmur of the Heart” and “Pretty Baby” also fall in among the director’s unusually perceptive depictions of childhood. Catherine Demongeot’s precocious 10-year-old heroine in “Zazie in the Metro” (June 26 & 30), for instance, cusses like a sailor and asks a cabbie to marry her. Those who liked Amelie will like Zazie; those with an aversion to zany Paris hijinks, replete with camera tricks, are advised to stay away.

Finally, the semi-autobiographical “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” (June 24, July 15 & July 16) traces the slowly evolving friendship between two bright 12-year-old boys, Julien (Gas pard Manesse) and Jean (Raphael Fejto), students in a Catholic boarding school in Fountainebleu during the occupation. The chums share a love of “The Three Musketeers” – and the secret that Jean is Jewish. Tender yet never mawkish, serious but not woodenly solemn, Malle’s film is made all the more affecting by the director’s own voiceover confession at the end.

Until July 19 (Lincoln Center, 212-875-5600).