To call Claire Denis one of the two or three greatest female directors is to insult her talent; she ranks one of the most daring, subtle, and consistently inventive postwar French filmmakers, period. Together with Andre Techine, Olivier Assayas, and Arnaud Desplechin, she belongs to the unofficial nouvelle vague of the 1990s, a brilliant and still underestimated decade of French filmmaking. Beginning today with the Palme d’Or- winning debut “Chocolat,” and continuing every Tuesday through February, the French Institute Alliance Francaise will present a near-complete retrospective of her remarkable features, along with short films and documentaries by and about this singular contemporary master.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ms. Denis embarked on an inspired apprenticeship. Working for Jacques Rivette placed her in contact with the nouvelle vague tradition she would perpetuate in her own filmmaking. Like Jim Jarmusch, for whom she worked on “Down by Law,” her sympathies lie with marginal characters, her worldview is cosmopolitan, and her narratives are willfully unconventional. Like Dusan Makavejev, for whom she worked on “Sweet Movie,” she possesses a wildly unfettered imagination and strong leftist point of view. She assisted Wim Wenders in filming “Paris, Texas” and “Wings of Desire” and shares both his internationalism and his pleasure in landscape for its own sake.

Every shot of 1988’s “Chocolat,” for example, is first a meticulously presented landscape, interior, or still life. Told in the form of an extended flashback, the movie recalls, critiques, and lyricizes Ms. Denis’s childhood in French-colonial Africa. In what is likely the least subtle detail in the entire Denis oeuvre, we observe events through the eyes of a young girl named France. Her father, a local administrator, is often away on business; her mother is beautiful and bored. The strongest presence in their life is a servant named Protee (the magnificent Isaach De Bankole), whose increasingly tense relationship with his French employers gives the movie its shape.

Ms. Denis’s criticism of colonialism isn’t especially insightful, but the tension between her ideological interests and her purely aesthetic ones lends this luminescent debut a unique, low-wattage ambivalence. Its clipped rhythms, extreme precision of detail, and air of great concentration mark “Chocolat” as the work of a talented Bresson disciple. In her next two features, Ms. Denis would refine this influence into a diamantine lyricism all her own.

“No Fear, No Die” (screening January 11), from 1990, is a tough, noirish story about immigration and underground cock fighting. Memorable for its sharply etched milieu and bracing lack of sentimentality, Ms. Denis’s bold sophomore effort was the beginning of her work with Alex Descas, an intense and striking actor who would become one of her favorite supporting players.

On 1993’s “I Can’t Sleep” (February 15), a highly original portrait of opportunity, anonymity, and anxiety in the 18th arrondissement, Ms. Denis began her collaboration with two astonishingly gifted artists: cinematographer Agnes Godard and editor Nelly Quettier. The former gives light to Ms. Denis’s vigorous pictorial imagination; the latter is sensitive to the beguilements of her montage, her intrepid ellipsis, the verve of her intuition. Like Godard and Coutard, Scorsese and Schoonmaker, or Cronenberg and Suschitzky, the Denis-Godard-Quettier collaboration transcends mere rapport. (Ms. Denis’s other crucial collaborator, writing partner Jean-Pol Fargeau, had been involved since “Chocolat.”)

A pivotal film in the Denis oeuvre, 1996’s “Nenette and Boni” (February 22) maintains the originality of its predecessors but points to increased sophistication and abstraction. Gregoire Colin stars as Boni, an avidly hormonal 18-year-old eking out a living as a pizza maker in Marseille. Alice Houri is his younger sister, Nenette, who has fled her boarding school and shows up at his doorstep pregnant. Estranged from their father (Jacques Nolot), they live in their deceased mother’s house along with several of Boni’s mates, a white bunny rabbit, and much dirty laundry.

The movie belongs to the French tradition of empathetic, eroticized depictions of adolescence, an essentially spiritual subject that reached its 20th-century apotheosis in the work of Cocteau and Balthus. (The tradition finds its contemporary cinematic parallel in such deuxieme vague films as Erick Zonca’s “The Dream life of Angels,” Mr. Assayas’s “Cold Water,” and Mr. Techine’s “Wild Reeds.”) Ms. Denis caresses the physical and emotional textures of her protagonists’ lives with terrific delicacy, ravishing her young stars with a gorgeous improvisation of sound and image. No film has ever wrung such poignancy from the percolating gurgle of a Krups coffeemaker.

Then came 1999’s “Beau Travail” (January 18), a startling masterpiece, one of the great films of the last decade. Returning again to the West African coast of her childhood, Ms. Denis uses Melville’s “Billy Budd” as the template for a meditation on masculine ritual. This time the point of view belongs to Galoup (Denis Levant), an ex-Foreign Legion officer remembering his sun drenched days in Djibouti. That “Beau Travail” is all flashback, the recollection of particular conscious, goes some way toward explaining the strangeness of its form and the overwhelming beauty of its images.

The sights of “Beau Travail” can never be forgotten: soldiers as dolphins, sporting in the sapphire ocean; the hypnotic choreography of their callisthenic routines; the pulsating light of Djibouti nightclubs and the enigmatic women who frequent them; the weathered face of Galoup and the insolent gaze of Gilles Sentain (Mr. Colin), the young soldier whose beauty unravels the composure of his commanding officer.

Elusive and profound, “Beau Travail” defies description. Despite its relationship to Melville’s text (surprisingly close, if often oblique), it’s a supremely non-verbal feat of the imagination. Of all Ms. Denis’s films, this one suffers most on home video. Whatever else it’s about – masculinity, memory, music, time – “Beau Travail” is about light moving through space. See it at the FIAF or don’t see it at all.

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see “Trouble Every Day” anywhere else but video. Left out of the series, Ms. Denis’s most underrated film – a disturbing and enigmatic horror film starring Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle – gets slighted again. Instead, you’re welcome to try and find “Friday Night”(February 1) more compelling than I do.

Based on a novel by Emmanuele Bernheim, the least conceptually ambitious of Ms. Denis’s movies stars Valerie Lemercier as a woman about to move in with her lover when she gets caught in a traffic jam on a cold Paris night. Vincent Lindon co-stars as the random pedestrian/figment of her imagination whom she invites into the warmth of her car. Their ensuing affair is given in a lyric flow of close-ups and sensual fluctuations, a liquid prowl of images. To my mind, it adds up to a mood piece without a mood, though some of the keenest critics I know find it utterly ravishing.

From what I’ve read in festival coverage, Ms. Denis latest film, “L’intrus,” sounds like a return to wildly unpredictable form – it has something to do with a man requiring a heart transplant and his estranged Tahitian son – but we’ll have to wait a bit longer for a local premiere. (It’s set to play in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Rendezvous With French Cinema in March.) In the meantime, the Tuesday ravishments at the FIAF will more than tide you over.

Until February 22 (55 E. 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-355-6160).