Nouvelle Vague

Fresh from its premiere at Cannes, see Richard Linklater’s affectionate recreation of the moment Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave changed cinema forever.

It’s the summer of 1959 in Paris, and the eve of a cinematic revolution. Already having gained a reputation for rattling the French film industry’s cage as an iconoclastic film critic, Jean-Luc Godard has joined Cahiers du Cinéma colleagues François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol in exchanging the pen for the camera. His first feature, Breathless – a jazzy handheld thriller about the love affair between an American aspiring journalist and a French petty criminal starring up-and-coming actors Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo – is destined to rewrite the cinematic rule book and make him a global household name. But first, he has to actually make it … and shooting on the streets of Paris with zero permits, little money and no prepared script is easier said than done.

Evoking the film and era alike in his black-and-white reproduction of turn-of-the-60s Paris, Richard Linklater (Blue Moon) crafts a love letter to Godard’s genius and the movement that directly inspired his own radical and inventive work – as well as that of so many other filmmakers in the 65 years since Breathless took the film world by storm. Starring an extremely convincing Guillaume Marbeck as the legendary cineaste, Zoey Deutch as Seberg and dead-ringer newcomer Aubry Dullin as Belmondo, this highly anticipated Cannes 2025 sensation is a treat that no cinephile will want to miss.

Screening at Luna Leederville from January 8.