Nouvelle Vague: Netflix's Breathtaking Ode to French Cinema History

There is a particular thrill in watching a film about the making of films when the film being made was itself revolutionary. Nouvelle Vague — directed by Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused) — is set during the making of Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless) in the summer of 1959 in Paris, and it is precisely, gloriously that kind of thrill.

Released on Netflix in February 2026, Nouvelle Vague is one of the most visually ravishing, intellectually stimulating, and purely cinematic experiences of the year. It is, to use an appropriate analog, a French New Wave film about the French New Wave — made with the same improvisational spirit, the same love of cinema, and the same delight in the creative process that characterized the movement it celebrates.

The Story: Young Rebels Making History

The summer of 1959. Jean-Luc Godard, twenty-eight years old and hungry, is shooting his debut feature on the streets of Paris with a skeletal crew, a stolen camera mounted on a wheelchair, and two actors who barely know what the film is about. The film is Breathless. It will change cinema forever.

Nouvelle Vague follows this production — not as a simple biographical drama about Godard, but as something more impressionistic and affectionate: a portrait of a creative moment, of the specific electricity that exists in a group of young people who believe, who truly genuinely believe, that they are going to change everything. And who are right.

In this telling, we see Godard's obsessive, mercurial mind at work — the improvisation, the aesthetic arguments, the influences absorbed from American cinema and regurgitated into something entirely French. We see Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg circling each other on screen and off. We see the street-level chaos of an unauthorized shoot in 1959 Paris — the police interactions, the impromptu decisions, the sense of everything being made up as they go, which is exactly how Breathless was made.

Linklater makes a bold structural choice: the film is shot in black and white, on digital tools that mimic the grain and light of the period — not attempting to reproduce 1959 cinema, but to exist in the same aesthetic spirit that produced it. The choice is perfect.

Why Nouvelle Vague Matters

Cinema history is full of moments that feel inevitable in retrospect but were radical acts of creative faith in their execution. Nouvelle Vague is a film about one of those moments — and it is also, quietly, an argument for the continued importance of that faith. It says: here is what it looks like when young artists believe absolutely in what they are doing. Here is what becomes possible.

Where to Watch

Nouvelle Vague is streaming now on Netflix.

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