Film festival attendees (and now, awards watchers) have been able to enjoy a double dose of Richard Linklater in 2025, as the Austin-based filmmaker has released two very different films about 20th century artists and entertainment figures. In “Blue Moon,” Ethan Hawke plays 20th century lyricist Lorenz Hart — who collaborated with Richard Rodgers before being pushed aside in favor of Oscar Hammerstein II — in a somber chamber piece about a bitter artist watching an old friend succeed without him. On the other end of the spectrum is “Nouvelle Vague,” which sees Linklater applying his distinct knack for making breezy hangout films to the French New Wave.
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The film, which was shot entirely in Paris with a French crew, is a love letter to Jean-Luc Godard and French New Wave cinema, chronicling the chaotic process of shooting “Breathless” in 1959. Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard, while Aubry Dullin and Zoey Deutch play the legendary co-stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Plenty of other familiar faces from the era of French cinema make appearances as well, with many critics likening the film to Linklater’s version of “Midnight in Paris.
“If the best way to criticize a movie, as Cahiers du Cinéma critic Godard once said, is to make one, then director Richard Linklater’s answer to making a tribute to ‘Breathless’ might instead be to not quite criticize but certainly to subvert the tropes of movies about moviemaking,” IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio wrote in his Cannes review. “His black-and-white ‘Nouvelle Vague,’ itself a meticulous recreation of a movie made in 1959 with all the celluloid, Academy-ratio crackle and pop, is more New Wave hangout movie than cinema history, with the parade of faces and names inspiring knowing chuckles in the cinephile audience.”
Following its Cannes debut, “Nouvelle Vague” made its U.S. premiere at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival, where Deutsch spoke to IndieWire about what she saw as parallels between Linklater and Godard.
“They are two artists that have maintained their artistic integrity as filmmakers that do what they want to do and make movies that they want to make, not what other people want to see,” Deutsch said. “That is a rare quality. Even the greatest filmmakers of all time, most of them, waver at one point or another, and that’s OK. It is astonishing that [Rick] has never wavered from doing things that he wants to do for himself — not selfishly, but because that’s what you do. You make things that live inside of you that you have to get out and then it relates to other people. He and Godard share that quality.”
“Nouvelle Vague” opens in select theaters on Friday, October 31 before streaming on Netflix on November 14. Watch the teaser trailer below.
