Film Review: Nouvelle Vague

5 Stars

By Joseph Beyer | Nov. 22, 2025

You can be forgiven if the latest Richard Linklater film isn’t on your radar yet, as almost everything about it is a bit obscure, curious, and subtitled. But for fans of the French New Wave, a movement and loose dogma of filmmaking born in France during the 1950s that radically changed cinema, Nouvelle Vague will sweep you away and may become one of your most treasured Linklater projects yet.

That’s saying a lot about the maker behind such notable independent films as Boyhood, the Before… trilogy, Slacker, and the iconic Dazed and Confused (ranked by Esquire magazine as his finest). Linklater, born and raised in Texas, literally put Austin filmmaking on the map with his debut Slacker in 1990: a gritty suburbia comedy shot for $23,000 and introducing his signature wit and affinity for complex characters.

Linklater didn’t get into film school, instead taking community college courses and teaching himself from the early annals of cinema history, which included the French New Wave. As he says, it “represented freedom and personal expression.” Nouvelle Vague premiered fittingly at the Cannes Film Festival, where Netflix picked up U.S. distribution.

So after a remarkable career spanning three decades, Linklater finally got the chance to create his love letter to an era of motion-picture heroes and a behind-the-scenes recreation of another filmmaker’s debut: Jean Luc Godard and the now-classic Breathless from 1960. He was just 29 at the time and convinced that all you needed to make a movie was “a girl and a gun.”

In Nouvelle Vague, the director takes us into the chaos of this first indie film movement and a portrait of a time and place when boldness reigned, improvisational experimentation wowed, and some of the greatest cinema philosophies were broken.

Using a brilliantly sourced script from writers Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo, Jr., Michèle Pétin, and Laetitia Masson, director Linklater brings the film to life with the same energy, styles, and sense of inspiration as Godard’s original. Both films, the original and this new homage, are gorgeously shot in black and white.

Here Godard is effortlessly played by the young French actor Guillaume Marbeck, who portrays the famed critic going behind the lens for the first time as both brilliant and vulnerable at the same time. His quest to prove his worth with Breathless is as passionate as his disgust with an industry plagued by rules, leading to his conclusion that, “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world” (among other maxims).

The escapades onscreen follow Godard’s love triangle between himself and the film’s two starlets, as he struggles to direct the actors, engage them even as they fail to understand his approach, and keep his misfit crew from falling apart.

Actress Zoey Deutch is dazzling as the feisty American actress Jean Seberg, the reluctant and skeptical starlet of Godard’s film. Actor Aubry Dullin’s performance as the carefree criminal Jean-Paul Belmundo is equally transformative, and together their chemistry is as electric as the original.

The ensemble of complimentary performances includes other New Wave legends François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Agnès Varda who weave into Godard’s living manifesto. The French production team has so faithfully recreated every detail that you’ll be fully immersed in a Paris burning with youthful trickery, egos, and dreamers.

Linklater, like any outsider, sees it all best—and has translated into his own post-modern montage, and a gift to film fans unlike any other.

Streaming exclusively from Netflix, Nouvelle Vague runs a taut 1 hour and 46 minutes. The film contains French and English and is rated R. Side effects will include wanting to immediately watch Breathless, available for free on the internet along with other New Wave classics.