Nouvelle Vague

Richard Linklater shot Nouvelle Vague in French, in black and white, in the Academy ratio, with a cast of unknowns, and premiered it in the Cannes competition in 2025. It reconstructs the twenty-day production of À bout de souffle in the summer of 1959 — a film made with no completed screenplay, a hand-held camera pushed in a wheelchair, and a director who had never made a feature.

Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard as a young man behind sunglasses who is either the most confident person in Paris or performing confidence at enormous cost; Aubry Dullin is Belmondo and Zoey Deutch is Jean Seberg, the American who could not tell whether she was in a serious film. Truffaut, Chabrol, Rossellini, Melville and Bresson pass through. Linklater keeps the register affectionate and unsolemn, which is the correct choice for material this easily mythologised.

It holds 3.73 on Letterboxd from 117,000 ratings — the best-received film in this batch — and works whether or not you have seen the film it is about. If you have, the catalogue already holds Breathless and Le Mépris; watch this between them.