Nouvelle Vague

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (2025) is a charming, black-and-white reverie that slips into the bloodstream like a memory of cinema itself. It’s “very likeable” in the best way: light on its feet, inviting, and unabashedly in love with the French New Wave—its revolution, its grammar, its cigarette smoke and sidewalk verve.

Framed as the making of À bout de souffle, the film functions as both reconstruction and conversation. Linklater stages café corners, cramped hotel rooms, and street-level bursts of filmmaking with a wink, but never a smirk. The actors seem uncannily identical to the icons we carry in our heads—Belmondo’s insouciant shrug, Seberg’s quicksilver gaze—yet the performances aren’t waxwork mimicry; they feel lived-in, affectionate, and slyly aware of the myths they’re inhabiting.

Shooting in crisp black and white isn’t just a stylistic cosplay—it’s a thesis. The tones are tactile, the grain expressive, the shadows doing as much storytelling as the dialogue. You feel the era’s speed and looseness: jump cuts in spirit if not always in form, location sound that breaths, frames that wander because curiosity leads them there.

What gives the movie its extra snap is how it situates Breathless alongside the movement that sparked it. Truffaut’s The 400 Blows hovers nearby like a compass—another origin point for the Nouvelle Vague’s break with studio polish and inherited rules. Linklater tips his hat to that revolution without embalming it: the handheld freedom, the street casting, the sense that cinema could be journalistic one moment and poetic the next. You don’t just watch homages; you feel the why behind them.

It’s also very pleasant—unfussy, welcoming, a good hang with film history. For newcomers, it’s an excellent doorway into studying cinema, especially French cinema of the late ’50s and early ’60s: you get the vibe, the tools, the personalities, and a feel for the time without homework dread. For devotees, there’s joy in the details—the way a shot lines up with a remembered still, the cadence of a line, a stolen glance that plays like a footnote coming to life.

“Very well done” fits here because the film is modestly ambitious and lands its aims: it conjures a period, sketches a process, and lets its cinephilia glow rather than glare. By the end, you’re itching to rewatch À bout de souffle, to revisit The 400 Blows, and to tumble deeper into the Nouvelle Vague’s toolbox. That’s the mark of a smart tribute: it doesn’t close a chapter; it sends you back to the beginning.

I don't think you should FEEL about a movie. ... 
Jean-Luc Godard