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Exclusive: Richard Linklater’s love letter to the New Wave Nouvelle Vague has sold to more than 20 theatrical distributors worldwide for Goodfellas following its buzzy Cannes premiere, as one of four French majority productions in Competition this year.

They join Paris-based distributor Arp Sélection which will release the film in cinemas in France on October 8 on 500 screens, having produced the film under the banner of Arp Production with Linklater’s Austin-based Detour Film.

The French-language production about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s New Wave classic Breathless has sold out in Europe for Paris-based sales company Goodfellas.

It has unveiled deals to Benelux (Cherry Pickers), the UK & Ireland (Altitude), Switzerland (Filmcoopi), Germany, (Plaion), Spain (Elastica Films), Greece (Cinobo), Italy (Lucky Red /Bim), Portugal (Alambique), Scandinavia (TriArt Film), Ex-Yugoslavia (McF Megacom), Romania (Independenta), Baltics (Scanorama) and Cis (Mjm Group).

In the rest of the world, it has been acquired for...

Shot on black-and-white film with the same Cameflex model used by Jean-Luc Godard for Breathless––the film it portrays and embodies the making of––Nouvelle Vague is not merely an imitation of Godard. It’s a theft of Godard for a creation all its own, which is a strange thing to say about a movie that looks and feels so much like the one that inspired it. Richard Linklater’s newest, despite suggesting no form of his past work, rings much like Linklater.

The ode to both his mentor and own slacker style is a 50/50 fusion of the French New Wave master and his American counterpart, two directors inextricably linked through filmmaking philosophy, the latter of whom incepted and heavily shepherded the former’s career (and is still doing so 40 years later). Here, Linklater employs French New Wave style and technique to invoke Breathless itself while immersing us in the...

In Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater returns to the monochrome crucible of cinema’s youth, fashioning a 2024 sight-and-sound echo of Paris in 1959. Shot in French, framed in an Academy-ratio canvas, and rendered in high-contrast black-and-white, the film dramatizes Jean-Luc Godard’s birth-pangs as he conceives Breathless. Here, every gutter of light is an invitation to the unexpected, and each scratch of jazz on the soundtrack feels like a pulse in the night.

Linklater sets the scene on rain-slicked cobblestones and in cafés where cigarette smoke coils like a whispered confession. His camera glides past ragged film magazines and cluttered editing rooms, reminding us that creation can be brutal, thrilling, and absurd.

Through whispered arguments and bright-eyed determination, the story of Godard’s 20-day shoot unfolds as both homage and meditation on artistic risk. An affectionate portrait of youthful revolt, this opening gesture throbs with restless energy—an invitation to wonder whether...

Richard Linklater’s Cannes Competition title Nouvelle Vague had its world premiere the Palais this evening and was welcomed with a 11-minute ovation.

Quentin Tarantino was at tonight’s screening as well and helped lead the long-lasting applause. It was the second time he’d watched the film in about eight hours, having also caught a special screening late Saturday morning.

Quentin Tarantino greets Richard Linklater as Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’ (‘New Wave’) has its world premiere in #Cannes2025 pic.twitter.com/lofs7qKWUJ

— Deadline (@Deadline) May 17, 2025

An homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 classic Breathless, the French-language film reconstructs the story behind the film starring Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. French actor Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard, Zoey Deutch is Seberg, and newcomer Aubry Dullin portrays Belmondo.

Five-time Oscar nominee Linklater was last in the Cannes Competition with 2006’s Fast Food Nation and played Un Certain Regard with A Scanner Darkly that same year.

In 1983, Jim McBride attempted an English-language remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 cinema landmark, Breathless with Richard Gere. It broke one of Godard’s cardinal rules: It was in color. Although not as terrible an idea as Gus Van Sant’s disastrous shot-by-shot 1998 color remake of Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho — which, like Godard’s forever-influential movie the year before, also broke all the rules of its genre — it is dismissed today with the original still finding new life with young audiences each generation, as France’s New Wave also continues to do.

With the truly wonderful Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), premiering today in Competition at Cannes (where else?), Richard Linklater smartly has not attempted a remake of Breathless but rather a certain regard and respect for the wildly creative cinematic period Godard and his contemporaries achieved with the French New Wave. A cinema revolutionary in spirit and deed himself — just watch his...

In “Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater’s ingenious and enchanting docudrama about the making of “Breathless,” the 29-year-old Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) never takes off his sunglasses. He wears them on the set and in the office, in restaurants and at the movies.

The omnipresent round dark shades serve several functions. First and foremost, they’re authentic — Godard, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, really did wear his sunglasses all the time, almost as a form of branding. They were instrumental in lending him his mystique: that of an intellectual artist who was cool, who knew how to keep his distance, who had things on his mind he was too hip to share. Yet the sunglasses also accomplish something else. In a biopic, no actor looks exactly like the person they’re playing. But the unknown French actor Guillaume Marbeck, with a bushy widow’s peak and a chiseled poker face,...

The official synopsis for Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague describes it as “the story of Godard making Breathless, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made Breathless.”

It’s a catchy pitch but also a bit deceiving. Godard’s 1960 film broke all sorts of narrative and stylistic conventions, writing its own rules about what a movie could do and paving the way for modern cinema as we know it. Linklater’s charming and well-researched homage is much more traditional: Told in a linear fashion, shot with a sizeable crew, featuring actors who look and act like the famous people they’re playing, relying on tons of VFX shots to recreate Paris at the time, it’s a far cry from the style of Godard. And yet it does an impressive job capturing the spirit of the man at work, highlighting what it took — and often didn’t take...

After releasing two films last year with Hit Man and the rather-overlooked God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, the ever-prolific Richard Linklater returns in 2025 with another pairing. Earlier this year he premiered Blue Moon at Berlinale. Ahead of that film’s October release, he’s at Cannes to premiere Nouvelle Vague, his tribute to the French New Wave and chronicle of the making of Breathless––all directed in the style of Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark debut. A first trailer has arrived for the feature (still seeking U.S. distribution) ahead of the premiere.

The cast includes Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Matthieu Penchinat as Raoul Coutard, Adrien Rouyard as François Truffaut, Antoine Besson as Claude Chabrol, Roxane Rivière as Agnès Varda, Jean-Jacques Le Vessier as Jean Cocteau, Côme Thieulin as Éric Rohmer, Laurent Mothe as Roberto Rossellini, Jonas Marmy as Jacques Rivette,...

After releasing two films last year with Hit Man and the rather-overlooked God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, the ever-prolific Richard Linklater returns in 2025 with two more features. Earlier this year he premiered Blue Moon at Berlinale. Now Sony Pictures Classics, in the official CinemaCon program guide, has confirmed a fall release window for the drama.

Described as “a funny Valentine to old Broadway,” here’s the synopsis: “On the evening of March 31, 1943, legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart confronts his shattered self-confidence in Sardi’s bar as his former collaborator Richard Rodgers celebrates the opening night of his ground-breaking hit musical Oklahoma!“

Meanwhile, Linklater looks to have locked his next feature Nouvelle Vague, his tribute to the French New Wave and chronicle of the making of Breathless, directed in the style of Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark debut. While it’s still seeking U.S. distribution, French distributor Arp Sélection has confirmed an...

Much has been said of the overwhelming ingenuity of Jean-Luc Godard’s early films, but less so about just how well the director knew how to work around budgetary limitations. Alphaville, a dystopian sci-fi noir set in an Orwellian world of omnipresent surveillance run by a malevolent artificial intelligence, sounds at first blush like a large-scale work filled with the sort of macro world-building one typically sees in blockbusters. But Godard, working with next to no resources, captures the oppressiveness of totalitarian government through the claustrophobic conditions of repressed citizens. Ordinary Parisian streets and buildings are captured as they are, though in inky shadow, so that a certain kind of present-day dilapidation comes to suggest futuristic social decay.

Godard takes private detective Lemmy Caution and illustrates Alphaville’s themes of social tension and incipient fascism by demolishing the man’s image. Godard secured Eddie Constantine, who had already played Caution...

First look notwithstanding, details have been few and far between on Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, largely understood to concern the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, making notable a new set report from Les Inrockuptibles. It should’ve been obvious from the jump that America’s premier hangout filmmaker would resurrect cinema’s most-influential group as, well, a group, with Linklater describing his film as (in a somewhat contradictory manner) “the story of a personal revolution in cinema led by one man, and all the people around him,” with the implication of actors playing Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Jean Cocteau.

Fittingly, Nouvelle Vague will not start with Zoey Deutch’s Jean Seberg (admittedly odd combination of words) filming on the Champs-Élysées, but at least stretches back to the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where, upon The 400 Blows‘ triumphant debut, Godard “succeeded in convincing producer...

François Truffaut’s ode to Hitchcock and Cornell Woolrich is an ice-cold femme revenge tale. Jeanne Moreau exacts retribution from five men who made her a widow on her wedding day. Truffaut winds it as tightly as a mousetrap, leaving Ms. Moreau’s psychology a mystery — feminists can debate whether the film is misogynistic. Raoul Coutard’s color cinematography is deceptively warm and inviting; the film’s biggest boost comes from Bernard Herrmann’s powerful music score.

The Bride Wore Black

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1968 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 107 min. / Street Date February 14, 2023 / La mariée était en noir / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Michel Bouquet, Jean-Claude Brialy, Charles Denner, Claude Rich, Michael Lonsdale, Daniel Boulanger, Alexandra Stewart, Sylvine Delannoy, Luce Fabiole, Michèle Montfort.

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

Production Designer: Pierre Guffroy

Film Editor: Claudine Bouché

Original Music: Bernard Herrmann

Written by François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard from the novel by William Irish...

Jean Luc-Godard, who died Tuesday at the age of 91, was widely known as the King of the French New Wave. Since coming onto the scene in the 1960s, his seminal films such as “Breathless,” “Masculin, Feminin” and “Pierrot Le Fou,” introduced avante-garde techniques that have been since been replicated by innumerable filmmakers in the following decades.

In addition to a scathing intellectualism and stubborn stance against “the establishment”, the Franco-Swiss director was best known for changing the rules of cinema — his use of long-takes, jump-cuts and actor asides are just a few of the innovative practices he employed in his films that are still used to this day.

Thankfully, Godard left behind dozens of unforgettable films, many of which have been restored on Criterion. Below, check out some of Godard’s best films to celebrate the late director:

‘Pierrot le fou’ Courtesy of Amazon

Godard perfects the Pop Art color...

Jean-Luc Godard spent his career reshaping the everyday language of cinema. From Oscar darlings to the latest entry into the MCU, it’s hard to find a film or television series untouched by the influence and innovations of Godard, who died this week at the age of 91. Just consider the narrative and technical choices he made in his very first film, “Breathless”: Jump cuts, natural lighting, long takes, freeze frames, on-location shooting. All unorthodox at the time, yet now the type of thing you could clock across any given night of programming on HBO or FX.

In 2022, who can’t recognize the jittery look of a handheld camera? Who would be alarmed to see an onscreen character directly addressing the camera? Who’s never seen a movie directed by either Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee? Whether or not Godard was actually the first person to pay homage to an...

My favorite tracking shot in film history is not a tracking shot. It's a shot of a tracking shot.

The scene in question opens Jean Luc-Godard's "Contempt," and, visually, consists of little more than a movie camera gliding down a dolly track toward a stationary camera, which serves as the audience's Pov. As the camera moves closer into view, we see that it is shooting, at a 90-degree angle square to our perspective, a young woman (Giorgia Moll) scribbling notations in a book. Eventually, the camera rolls to a stop directly in front of our camera, which is now a low-angle shot of the film's cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, who pans his implement 90-degrees before pointing it downward at the audience. The effect is at once startling and amusing. We have, in essence, locked eyes with the filmmaker.

This may not sound terribly thrilling in writing, but factor in a...

This unheralded story of the French retreat in 1954 Vietnam is one of the best films ever about guerilla combat. The professional French soldiers do what they can to avoid capture, but the new Lieutenant won’t abandon their wounded. The Alsatian top sergeant fought with the Germans ten years before, yet is the best and fairest man in the unit. Director Pierre Schoendoerffer knows of what he films — he was captured by the Viet Minh at the fall of Dien Bien Phu. With the able camerawork of the legendary Raoul Coutard, the movie feels very realistic; we’re told that it was used to teach military cadets.

The 317th Platoon

DVD

Icarus Films

1965 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 95 min. / La 317ème section / Street Date June 29, 2021 / Available from Icarus Films / 29.98

Starring: Jacques Perrin, Bruno Cremer, Pierre Fabre, Manuel Zarzo, Boramy Tioulong, Saksi Sbong.

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

Film Editor: Armand Psenny

Original Music:...

Cinematographer and director Michael Chapman, known for his work on Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “The Last Waltz,” died Sunday. He was 84.

His spouse, screenwriter and film director Amy Holden Jones’ Facebook page confirmed the news of his death, writing: “Michael Chapman ASC, love of my entire adult life, has passed. Until we meet again.”

He was nominated for two Oscars for best cinematography, for “Raging Bull” — with its distinctive black and white photography — and “The Fugitive.”

Chapman began his film career as a camera operator, working on projects such as Hal Ashby’s “The Landlord,” “The Godfather” and “Jaws.” He cited his mentor, Gordon Willis, the director of Ashby’s “The Last Detail,” French cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Scorsese, with whom he collaborated several times, as people who impacted him greatly.

His later films as director of photography or cinematographer included “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,...

While Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte (made in 1955 and shown a few years later) may have been the film to launch the French New Wave, it exploded with Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 Breathless, written by fellow New Wave auteur François Truffaut, stunningly shot by Raoul Coutard, and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. StudioCanal has now beautifully restored the original print in 4K resolution just in time for the 60th anniversary. In the U.K., the film will be released on a 4K Uhd Collector’s Edition with 12’’ Vinyl as well as DVD, Blu-ray, and digital on November 9th––and now we have a new trailer and poster.

In his riff on American film noir, Breathless film conveys the trajectory of small-time crook Michel Poiccard (Belmondo) who finds himself on the run after stealing a car and murdering a police officer in cold blood. Reuniting with his former girlfriend, American...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Guillaume Nicloux's To the Ends of the World is showing January and February, 2020 in the series From France with Love.A man, center-frame, despondent and immobile, sits on a bench, his head hanging heavy on his chest. Behind him, a foggy background reveals lightly-dressed soldiers trodding the ground in a casual manner, their movement slowed down to strolling. When Robert Tassen (a gritty Gaspard Ulliel) finally aligns his gaze with the spectator, even framed in long shot, his eyes are piercing, brimming with rage. Guillaume Nicloux’s fourteenth feature, To the Ends of the World, is a febrile film set in the time preceding the First Indochina War and, at once, a meditation on grief and ire, the personal and social overlapping in genesis of a war trauma which turns out to be a festering, often crippling wound.

My teenage introduction to art film culture was something of a science fiction auteur-detour (R2-D2?). I discovered Alphaville at a tiny art theater above the Fox Riverside, where Gone with the Wind had previewed in 1939. I bought the filmscript book to understand what the heck was going on… and slowly began to appreciate Jean-Luc Godard. Fifty-two years later I can’t claim a complete understanding, but I’m certain that the ‘étrange aventure’ of Lemmy Caution is as original a film, of any kind, that I’ve ever seen.

Alphaville

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1965 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 99 min. / Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution / Street Date July 9, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Howard Vernon, Michael Delahaye, Christa Lang, Jean-Pierre Leaud.

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

Film Editor: Agnès Guillemot

Original Music: Paul Misraki

Poems by Paul Éluard

Produced by André Michelin

Written...

At the beginning of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers,” his 2003 tribute to the French New Wave, Matthew, the naïve American studying in Paris, refers to true lovers of cinema as “the insatiables.” James Franco, with his 150 acting credits, 39 directing credits, 25 writing credits, and single credit as “boom operator,” is one of the industry’s most insatiable insatiables. So it’s fitting that his peripatetic career has led him to direct “Pretenders,” essentially a remake of “The Dreamers,” that combines Bertolucci’s decadent appreciation of New Wave cool with the love triangle from François Truffaut’s 1962 touchstone, “Jules and Jim.”

Moving the action to 1980s New York adds an urban-contemporary feel and an identifiable environment for events to unfold. But while the film’s sense of experimentation carries a fair amount of intrigue, it traps its central threesome in an Easter egg-filled intellectual exercise punctuated by melodramatic strokes. It’s skillful...

The most visceral experiences force you to bury your head in those two sullen hands at the end of those weakening arms; covered by fingers, you force a peep through the gaps because curiosity is a menace to your sanity. New Wave cinema has also manipulated its audience in this way, since, no matter when or where yet, with its brazen attitude, hip demeanour, and stylish cinematography, you are obliged to soak it in as a whole. When it comes to the handling of taboo subject matter, only the best pioneering auteurs succeed in whisking its audience in a whirlwind and smashing previously socially-acceptable boundaries with a ten-ton hammer. Koreyoshi Kurahara was one such auteur and his maniacal 1960 film ‘The Warped Ones’ is as glamorous and cool as it is vicious and brutal.

“The Warped Ones” is screening at Japan Society:

A frenzied foray into the nihilistic madness of post-war youth,...

Cinema St. Louis presents the 11th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival which takes place March 8-10, 15-17, and 22-24, 2019. The location this year is Washington University’s Brown Hall Auditorium, Forsyth & Skinker boulevards.

The 11th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — presented by TV5MONDE and produced by Cinema St. Louis — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1930s through the 1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema. The fest annually includes significant restorations, and this year features seven such works: Pierre Schoendoerffer “The 317th Platoon,” Marcel Pagnol’s “The Baker’s Wife,” Olivier Assayas’ “Cold Water,” Jacques Becker’s “The Hole,” Jacques Rivette’s “The Nun,” Agnés Varda’s “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t,” and Diane Kurys’ “Peppermint Soda.” The schedule is rounded out by Robert Bresson’s final film, “L’argent,” and two 1969 films celebrating...

In celebration of its 100th anniversary, the American Society of Cinematographers has released a list of the 100 best shot films of the 20th century.

This list was released to "showcase the best of cinematography as selected by professional cinematographers.” Here's how the list was put together:

The process of cultivating the 100 films began with Asc members each submitting 10 to 25 titles that were personally inspirational or perhaps changed the way they approached their craft. “I asked them — as cinematographers, members of the Asc, artists, filmmakers and people who love film and whose lives were shaped by films — to list the films that were most influential,” Fierberg explains. A master list was then complied, and members voted on what they considered to be the most essential 100 titles.

Here's a little sizzle reel that was cut together showcasing some of the films on the list:

It's hard to argue with the Top 10 films,...

Jean-Luc Godard's The Image Book (2018) is having its exclusive online premiere in the United Kingdom from December 3 – January 1, 2019.The first thing we see in Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, The Image Book, is the pointing hand of Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John The Baptist, believed by many to be his final work in oils—a masterpiece of sfumato, though Godard’s image is contrasty black-and-white like a Xerox some generations removed from the original. Next, two hands, maybe the director’s, pinning together lengths of film at a Steenbeck editing table, and one of those esoteric quotations for which Godard is famous: “Man’s true condition: to think with hands,” from the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont, previously featured in Godard’s magnum opus, Histoire(s) du cinéma. Then, a montage from Histoire(s): hands (including Giacometti’s The Hand) and part of a favorite quotation from St.

Czech indie producer director Vaclav Marhoul says he knew from the moment he got his hands on Jerzy Kosinski’s Holocaust novel “The Painted Bird” that he had to adapt it for the screen.

Finding the book at all in Central Europe was not easy even a decade ago, when Marhoul took up the challenge of creating the mythic, war-torn land of the tragi-comic story by the author of “Being There”; it had long been banned during the communist era and copies were still rare, Marhoul says.

He credits below-the-line colleagues in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic for much of the feat. To conjure the book’s dark and haunting world, the director brought in cinematographer Vladimir Smutny and production designer Jan Vlasak, two of the nation’s top creatives in their fields.

“The Painted Bird” spins a netherworld of Slavic wartime horrors intermixed, Marhoul says, with just the right measure of hope.

Perhaps Jean-Luc Godard’s most accessible feature, Contempt is nearly (but not quite) conventional in the way it tells its tale of the disintegration of the marriage between a bored trophy wife (Brigitte Bardot) and her ineffectual husband. Michel Piccoli plays the well-meaning screenwriter who is about to lose his beautiful playmate to an arrogant bully-boy producer played by Jack Palance. Godard’s cool-as-a-cucumber approach, offset by Raoul Coutard’s ravishing cinematography and Georges Delerue’s achingly beautiful score, makes Contempt a moving yet defiantly unsentimental experience. Martin Scorsese tipped his hat to Godard’s classic in 1995’s Casino (where Delerue’s music underscored De Niro and Stone’s doomed relationship).

The post Contempt appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) is showing December 24, 2017 - January 23, 2018 in the United States as part of the retrospective For Ever Godard.One thing most commonly and justly admired in Contempt (1963) by the many who revere the film is its singular place on the dividing line in cinema between classicism and modernism. The 1960s, and most intensely in mid-decade, was a transitional time for these phases, one that of course should never be simplified because of the many instances in which classical directors looked ahead with modernist impulses or modern directors (like the New Wave coterie of which Jean-Luc Godard was a part) looked back with longing to what had gone before. Among so many movies that affirm this point, it’s enough to cite Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954), a touchstone for modern cinema, which it anticipated (though without...

Mubi's retrospective For Ever Godard is showing from November 12, 2017 - January 16, 2018 in the United States.Jean-Luc Godard is a difficult filmmaker to pin down because while his thematic concerns as an artist have remained more or less consistent over the last seven decades, his form is ever-shifting. His filmography is impossible to view in a vacuum, as his work strives to reflect on the constantly evolving cinema culture that surrounds it: Godard always works with the newest filmmaking technologies available, and his films have become increasingly abstracted and opaque as the wider culture of moving images has become increasingly fragmented. Rather than working to maintain an illusion of diegetic truth, Godard’s work as always foreground its status as a manufactured product—of technology, of an industry, of on-set conditions and of an individual’s imagination. Mubi’S Godard retrospective exemplifies the depth and range of Godard’s career as...

The use of “I” statements when attempting to review a piece of art is often times the sign of a weak or lazy critic. However, in the case of viewing the newly-released Kino Lorber Blu-ray of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (which comes hand in hand with a release of the iconic filmmaker’s equally revolutionary Le Gai Savior), it’s all but impossible not to give personal context.

One of Godard’s most esoteric and polarizing works, La Chinoise is a simply constructed story of a group of students, led by Jean-Pierre Leaud’s Guillaume, who form a Maoist revolutionary collective that ultimately sees extreme action as the only thing that can spark any actual change in the modern world. Leaud is opposite the brilliant Anne Wiazemsky who takes on the role of Veronique, effectively the co-leader of the small group, a group that draws inspiration from the students...

Photo by Darren HughesThe Unknown Girl opens with a handheld close up of Dr. Jenny (Adèle Haenel) examining a patient. “Listen,” she says, handing her stethoscope to Julien (Olivier Bonnaud), a medical student who is interning at her clinic. Never ones to shy away from a glaring metaphor, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne announce in that brief exchange their film’s driving thematic and formal concerns. When Jenny later learns that her decision to not allow a late-night visitor into the clinic might have contributed to the young woman’s death, she puts her skills and training to new purpose: listening for clues that might help solve the murder.The Unknown Girl differs from the Dardennes’ previous fiction films only in its more obviously generic plotting. This seems to have contributed to the uncharacteristically mixed reviews that greeted the film at its 2016 Cannes premiere, where it was faulted for failing to...

A breezy five-episode compilation movie about swindles plays out in five film capitals, under the eye of five different directors including Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. But Roman Polanski’s Amsterdam segment couldn’t be included, which is a shame. It’s in B&W ‘scope, and everybody gets to bring their favorite cameraman and composer along.

The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1964 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 95 108, 124 min. / Street Date April 25, 2017 / Les plus belles escroqueries du monde / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring: Mie Hama, Ken Mitsuda, Nicole Karen, Gabriella Giorgelli, Jan Teulings, Arnold Gelderman, Guido Giuseppone, Giuseppe Mannajuolo, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Catherine Deneuve, Francis Blanche, Sacha Briquet, Jean-Louis Maury, Philomène Toulouse, Charles Denner, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Seberg, László Szabó.

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard, Tonino Delli Colli, Jerzy Lipman, Asakazu Nakai, Jean Rabier

Film Editor:

Original Music: Serge Gainsbourg, Pierre Jansen, Krzysztof Komeda, Michel Legrand, Keitaro Miho, Piero Umiliani...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question: Inspired by Baby Groot’s “Mr. Blue Sky” dance sequence at the beginning of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” what movie has the best opening credits sequence?

April Wolfe (@awolfeful), La Weekly

Hands down, it’s R.W. Fassbinder’s “The Marriage of Maria Braun.” I watch the opening sequence at least three times a year and show it to every filmmaker I can. I love any film that begins with a bang, and this one does quite literally: We open up on an explosion that rips out a hunk of brick wall, exposing a German couple in the middle of a rushed marriage ceremony.

Babette Mangolte. © Fleur van Muiswinkel If the name Babette Mangolte doesn’t ring with the same familiarity as such storied French cinematographers as Raoul Coutard and William Lubtchansky, it’s not for lack of innovation or accomplishment. Born in Montmorot in 1941, Mangolte moved to New York in 1970 following a number of years as an assistant cinematographer and apprentice to director Marcel Hanoun. There she quickly integrated herself into the city’s burgeoning experimental cinema scene, befriending luminaries such as Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, and soon after met a 20-year-old Chantal Akerman whom she proceeded to collaborate with on a series of groundbreaking works throughout the mid-70s. Influenced as much by structuralism as the films of the French New Wave, Mangolte and Akerman deftly utilized time and space as cinematic conduits to visually articulate themes of dislocation, alienation, and female autonomy. Their most celebrated work, the landmark feminist dispositif Jeanne Dielman,...

Plus: Netflix gets some new talent, a post roundup and five perfect shots.

It’s been three years since director Jennifer Kent released The Babadook, and in all that time I still haven’t gotten a good night sleep, either because I was terrified said titular entity might be lurking in the shadows, or because I was wondering when and what Kent’s next project would be. A year or so ago she started dropping some hints, but as of a press release issued yesterday, we now have all the gory and glorious details.

The film is called The Nightingale — I’ve already got chills — and it sounds like we’re in for another dark thriller, albeit a little more grounded in reality. Dig the synopsis:

Set in Tasmania in 1825, The Nightingale follows a beautiful 21-year-old Irish female convict who witnesses the brutal murder of her husband and baby by her soldier master and his cronies. Unable...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean-Luc Godard's La gai savoir (1969) is showing from January 18 - February 17, 2017 in many countries around the world as part of the retrospective For Ever Godard.Le gai savoir (Joy of Learning, 1969) is a film by Jean-Luc Godard which, unlike classics such as Breathless (1960) or Contempt (1963) is hardly a household name. Godard’s Weekend (1967) gives us an inkling of what is to come in its postscript production credit: What translates to mean “End of story” and then “End of cinema” flashes in blue lettering on a black backdrop; a moment later, we see that this word game has been created using a statement of the film’s visa control number. Of course, Godard had already been engaging in this kind of word play for years in his credits and intertitles. Although these statements could also be taken as being typical,...

December 28, 2016. R.I.P. Debbie Reynolds, actress and singer. Age 84.There is a nice moment in the documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds where Carrie’s brother Todd is showing the filmmakers a wall in his living room that tells the story of his mother’s life through movie posters. When Debbie Reynolds passed away on December 28—the day after her daughter Carrie in what was certifiably the last straw of 2016— I tried to find a great poster to commemorate her, but I couldn’t find anything really worthy of her (she was rarely the star of her own posters for one thing). I had forgotten, however, about this lovely Italian poster for Singing’ in the Rain which captures her as the burst of sunshine she always was.More often than I would have liked last year I found myself using my Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr as a memorial,...

NEWSRaoul Coutard shooting BreathlessThe great cinematographer Raoul Coutard, legendary for his work shooting Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, and also a collaborator of Philippe Garrel, Nagisa Oshima, Costa-Gavras and François Truffaut, has died at the age of 92.Keep film alive! The New York non-profit film organization Mono No Aware has launched a Kickstarter to fund "the nation's first ever non-profit motion picture lab." An ambitious and worthy goal!Two film projects in the works we're very excited about: Claire Denis' High Life, starring Robert Pattinson and Patricia Arquette and co-written by Zadie Smith, and Leos Carax's Annette, a musical to star Adam Driver (everywhere these days!) and Rooney Mara.The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the first part of its retrospective devoted to exiled Chilean fabulist Raúl Ruiz, which will include new digital restorations of Bérénice (1983) and The Golden Boat (1990), as well as 35mm prints of such...

His filmography and background should make obvious that cinema suffered a great loss when Raoul Coutard passed away earlier this month, though the matter of not working for fifteen years may, for some, have a way of mitigating the event. (His death falling on election day didn’t exactly help, minus the opportunity to look at some pretty images during a grim time.) There also exists the ongoing, not-likely-to-ever-end debate about what a cinematographer does, and it’s particularly pronounced when his collaborations were with some of cinema’s greatest innovators. Where do genius and collaboration stand apart, and how might they be happy bedfellows?

A new, rather informative video essay by wolfcrow thus marks something of a gift for the curious mind, which is no doubt applicable to just about anybody who even bothered to click this link. Mixing critical analysis, historical insight — e.g. detailing the strategies that...

Raoul Coutard passed away at 92 earlier this week. Several of the legendary cinematographer’s films can be seen on FilmStruck, the new streaming service launched by TCM and the Criterion Collection.

Related storiesRaoul Coutard, Legendary French New Wave Cinematographer, Dies at 92That Movie About Jean-Luc Godard's Second Marriage is MisguidedJean-Luc Godard's Second Marriage Will Be Dramatized For 'Redoubtable,' From 'The Artist' Director Michel Hazanavicius...

Raoul Coutard, the French director of photography who revolutionized the field of cinematography with his unorthodox camerawork and lighting, has died. Closely associated with the French New Wave, the largely self-taught Coutard collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s, shooting almost all of the Franco-Swiss director’s classics of ageless cool, including Breathless, Band Of Outsiders, Pierrot Le Fou, and Contempt; in the process, he innovated and popularized the use of handheld camerawork and other techniques. Coutard was 92.

A veteran of the French Indochina War, Coutard lived in what is now Vietnam for 11 years, working as a freelance combat and editorial photographer for such magazines as Life and Paris Match. His first credit as a cinematographer is the stuff of film legend. After agreeing to “photograph” Pierre Schoendoerffer and Jacques Dupont’s documentary The Devil’s Pass, Coutard showed up on set believing he had been hired as ...

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Michael Mann‘s Ali will finally get a Blu-ray release on January 17, 2017, Sony announced today, although which cuts aren’t specified yet.

Watch Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac rehearse for Jacques Demy‘s The Young Girls of Rochefort:

Remember the late Raoul Coutard with his interview at The Guardian about the making of Breathless:

Jean-Luc fed them their lines as we were shooting and they repeated them after him. That’s why their delivery is a little jerky – there’s a slight time-lapse all the way through the film. We rehearsed the actors’ moves without their knowing what they were going to say. He wanted everything to be very fresh,...

Former army documentary cameraman worked on Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless [pictured].

Legendary French cinematographer Raoul Coutard who worked with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Pierre Schoendorffer, Jacques Demy and Costa-Gavras has died aged 92.

Coutard worked on more than 80 features in a career spanning from 1958 to 2001 but is best known for his work with New Wave pioneers Godard and Truffaut.

He got his big break working with Jean-Luc Godard on 1960 classic Breathless, which was credited with reinventing cinema at the time for its stripped-down, fast-paced aesthetic.

Godard — who wanted to shoot the film as much as possible with a handheld camera and natural lighting — had partly hired Coutard for his background as a documentary cameraman for the French army.

Coutard spent five years working with the army’s press service, mainly in French Indochina (today Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) in the late 1940s and early 50s.

Prior to that, he worked in a Paris photography lab, having dropped...

French cinematographer whose unorthodox, yet highly inventive, photography became a pure expression of New Wave values

Raoul Coutard, who has died aged 92, was one of the great modern cinematographers and the principal lighting cameraman of the French New Wave. In that era of portable cameras and fast film stock, his simplified approach to filming and imaginative use of natural light broke with traditional aesthetics, in particular the polished images of the 1950s cinéma de qualité in France. He was identified most with the director Jean-Luc Godard, and Coutard’s direct and unorthodox, yet highly inventive, photography became a pure expression of New Wave values.

Related: French cinematographer Raoul Coutard – a life in pictures

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Raoul Coutard, a prominent figure in French cinema, has died after suffering from a long illness. He was 92.

The cinematographer passed away on Tuesday night, near Bayonne, France. The news was confirmed by the French newspaper Le Figaro who was notified by his family. The specific cause of death is yet unknown.

Coutard was born on September 16, 1924 in Paris. He is most associated with the New Wave period and shooting most of Jean-Luc Godard’s early films (“Breathless,” “Contempt,” “My Life to Live”) along with his collaborations with Francois Truffaut (“Shoot the Piano Player,” “Jules and Jim”). He also was the director of photography on Costa Gavras’ “Z.”

His career lasted nearly half a century and included over 80 features. He made his directorial debut in 1970 with the film “Haoa Binh,” which was nominated for...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit the interwebs. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (Michael Bay)

For better or worse, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is the purest distillation of Michael Bay’s cinematic voice. Bay’s favorite themes recur here from his brand of cheerleading GI Joe patriotism to righteous bloodlust to endlessly off-color non-sequiturs. And years of carpet bombing criticism targeted at his continued lack of political correctness and subtlety have...

Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

A Married Woman (Jean-Luc Godard)

A Married Woman is an often overlooked masterwork from Godard’s most productive period. The plot appears to be simple: Charlotte (Macha Méril) is a young married woman having an affair with an actor. When she discovers that she is pregnant, she must decide which man is the father and which man she will stay with. In Godard’s hands, however, the film, described as a film about a woman’s beauty and the ugliness of her world,...

Here's something special, a Godard movie about people as much as concepts, and the dialogue doesn't sound as if it belongs in cartoon bubbles. Jean-Luc Godard turns his intellect to the subject of relationships and reveals a lot about himself. It's a beautiful show too -- with the incredible Macha Méril visually cut up for study piece by piece. A Married Woman Blu-ray Entertainment One / Cohen Film Collection 1964 / B&W / 1:37 full frame / 95 min. / Un Femme Marieacute;e / Street Date May 24, 2016 / 39.98 Starring Bernard Noël, Macha Méril, Philippe Leroy, Roger Leenhardt. Cinematography Raoul Coutard Film Editor Andrée Choty, Françoise Collin, Agnès Guillemot, Gérard Pollicand. Written and Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Imagine that -- a Jean-Luc Godard film not primarily organized around destructing film language. By 1964 Godard had taken apart the conventions of film editing and structure. He'd plumbed new depths in genre autopsies and blended moving pictures...

April 14 the Official Selection will be announced at the Cannes Film Festival press conference. While waiting, keep up with all the Festival news online and onFacebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram!

 

The official poster for the 69th Festival de Cannes -- taking place from May 11 to 22 and presided over by Australian director George Mille -- was designed using stills from Jean-Luc Godard 's film "Contempt" by Hervé Chigioni and his graphic designer Gilles Frappier. The 2016 visual identity has been created by Philippe Savoir (Filifox).

The festival described the poster as follows: 

"It's all there. The steps, the sea, the horizon: a man's ascent towards his dream, in a warm Mediterranean light that turns to gold. As an image it is reminiscent of a timeless quote used at the beginning of 'Contempt': 'Cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires'."

This year Michel Piccoli will open the Red Carpet for the 69th Festival de Cannes from the roof of the famous villa designed by the writer Curzio Malaparte,  It's a symbolic choice, since this film about the making of a film - regarded by many as one of the finest ever made in CinemaScope (the Piccoli/ Bardot pairing along with Fritz Lang, Raoul Coutard's cinematography, Georges Delerue's music, and so on and so forth) - had such a considerable impact on the history of film and cinephilia.

On the eve of its 70th anniversary, by choosing to represent itself under the symbol of this simultaneously palimpsest and unambiguous film, the Festival is reiterating its founding commitment: To pay tribute to the history of film and to welcome new ways of creating and seeing. The steps represent a kind of ascension towards the infinite horizon of a cinema screen." ...

In just about three weeks we’ll be getting the line-up for the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, but first, the official poster has landed. For the 69th Festival de Cannes, featuring a jury presided over by Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller, the yellow-tinted poster honors the Jean-Luc Godard classic Contempt. Check out the description below, along with a full version of the poster.

It’s all there. The steps, the sea, the horizon: a man’s ascent towards his dream, in a warm Mediterranean light that turns to gold. As an image it is reminiscent of a timeless quote by Michel Mourlet used at the beginning of Contempt: “Cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires”.

And so it is Michel Piccoli who in 2016, from the roof of the famous villa designed by the writer Curzio Malaparte, will open the red carpet for the 69th Festival de Cannes.