Since the premiere of Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, the film world has gone cuckoo all over again for the French New Wave. The film recounts the making of Breathless, the groundbreaking debut feature from Jean-Luc Godard, the revered “enfant terrible of French cinema.” Linklater’s film is so lovingly made, with such precise attention to detail, it’s almost like watching actual behind-the-scenes footage of this seminal work—an unfathomable treat for lovers of French film.
What is the French New Wave, Anyway?
La Nouvelle Vague was an influential film movement in France in the 1950s and 60s, which was kickstarted by a small group of film critics at the iconic magazine Cahiers du Cinéma: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette. The movement’s heyday lasted from 1959-1964, but its influence reached far and wide, inspiring directors worldwide and changing movie making forever. While some insist the New Wave consists only of films by these five Cahiers auteurs, many film scholars and fans include the slightly older and more established Left Bank directors Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, and Jacques Demy, as well.
Inspired by Italian Neorealism and the work of such Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, and Howard Hawks, one central tenet of the New Wave was the belief in the director as the author and creative force (l’auteur) behind a film. The “auteur theory” states that a director has a distinct style that is immediately recognizable across their body of work.
But what really defines the New Wave is style. Targeting a younger generation of filmgoers, New Wave directors shot quickly and cheaply outside of the French studio system, using experimental techniques—handheld camera, long takes, fast film stocks, jump cuts, ambient sound—to capture life as it unfolds and challenge rather than spoon feed audiences. No smooth dolly or crane shots here, just life rolling by in real time. Though sometimes they did throw a camera in a wheelchair, baby carriage, or mail cart for a bumpy ride to produce a cool visual effect.
New Wave directors embraced a freewheeling, improvisatory feel that favored the smaller, more lightweight cameras developed during World War II and natural light, allowing the crew to ditch the tripod and follow the action without having to worry about setting up lights. New Wave directors shot in real locations (instead of on set), and used long takes with visible cuts to increase the pacing and draw attention to the auteur’s hand.
New Wave narratives often touch on existential themes, with stories about young working- or middle-class characters in contemporary France searching for (and often failing to find) meaning. While most films’ narrative arcs have a precise beginning, middle and end, New Wave films often follow characters aimlessly, capturing their routines and relationships, mirroring real life.
While they rejected the stuffiness of traditional French studio films, Godard, Truffaut and their colleagues revered—more than anything—film and film history. Michel, the petty thief protagonist of Breathless, famously studies and imitates Humphrey Bogart’s gestures and facial expressions. Stories are just as likely to focus on women, either tortured heroines like Cléo in Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7, or free-spirited ones like Patricia in Breathless and the four party girls in Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the Nouvelle Vague transformed cinema. The movement encouraged formal experimentation, profundity, and challenging plots and themes, popularizing free-spirited characters, quirky performances, and unpredictable, even wacky plots. It opened up a whole new world of possibility to filmmakers that delighted and inspired much of the mad cinematic genius that has come since. Fans and followers include Martin Scorsese, John Cassavetes, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, and Charles Burnett, and the New Wave was a great influence for mumblecore filmmakers like Greta Gerwig and the Duplass brothers. Danish directors Von Trier and Vintenberg even had their own New Wave-inspired movement, Dogme 95. The New Wave was born of love of cinema and the joy of breaking the rules, which is evident in every frame.
The Top 12 Most Iconic French New Wave Films
Hiroshima Mon Amour, directed by Alain Resnais, 1959
Left Bank director Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Hiroshima Mon Amour basically blew up the filmmaking rulebook. As the director of the acclaimed 1955 documentary Night and Fog about Auschwitz, Resnais was initially hired to make a doc about Hiroshima and the atomic bomb. Instead he outlined a story about a brief, passionate affair between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) in post-WWII Hiroshima and sent it to literary rockstar Marguerite Duras, who received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay. Playing more like a poem or a dream than a traditional narrative, the influential film moves between past and present, the affair—and the broken city being rebuilt around them—unlocking a window into the memories of war and loss that haunt the woman, who reveals her tragic romance with a German soldier. Her words circle the couple, as inevitable as ocean waves, against a ghostly landscape that exists in their minds, their fading memories, and an eerie present that might finally offer the peace she has been seeking.
Stream on The Criterion Channel. Rent on Prime, Google Play or YouTube.
Also recommended: Last Year at Marienbad.
The Good Girls (Les bonnes femmes), directed by Claude Chabrol, 1960
The first of the New Wave icons at Cahiers du Cinéma to direct his own film, Chabrol was extremely prolific. Beginning with Le Beau Serge in 1958, he averaged a film a year until his death in 2010. Known as the French Hitchcock, Chabrol specialized in film noir. Even Les bonnes femmes, the story of four shopgirls (Stéphane Audran, Bernadette Lafont, Clotilde Joano, and Lucile Saint-Simon), is so striking in its darkly pessimistic view of male-female relationships, it plays like a horror film—or a troubling documentary about the hollow fantasies and disillusionment of naïve working-class parisiennes. Initially a flop, through the years the film was reassessed as one of Chabrol’s strongest. Jane, Rita, Ginette, and Jacqueline work together in a dreary appliance store, dreaming of falling in love with the perfect man and leaving their jobs to live fairy tale lives as wives and mothers. But in this shadowy version of Paris, the starry-eyed friends go out drinking every night, only to fight off leering creeps who couldn’t be farther from Prince Charming. From the first scene, the threat of violence hangs in the air, and we can only hold our breath, waiting for it to strike.
The Good Girls in not currently available on digital platforms at this time.
Also recommended: Le Beau Serge, The Cousins, Les Biches, The Butcher, Story of Women, La Cérémonie.
Céline and Julie Go Boating, directed by Jacques Rivette, 1974
While Rivette never earned the rabid fan base of his trendier Cahiers colleagues Godard and Truffaut, this playful, rule-shattering, and mind-bending (in a Mulholland Drive kind of way) film has through the years achieved cult status. Sitting on a park bench reading a book about magic, loopy librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier) spots elusive magician Céline (Julie Berto) traipsing past and spontaneously follows her, like Alice chasing the White Rabbit. The two become besties, move in together, and eventually stumble into a murder mystery—a story within the story—taking place in an ivy-covered mansion. The result is a trippy buddy adventure film so wacky and wonderful, it often gets voted cinephiles’ favorite movie about female friendship.
Stream on The Criterion Channel or Kanopy.
Also recommended: The Nun, La Belle Noiseuse, Paris Belongs to Us.
Jules and Jim, directed by François Truffaut, 1962
One of cinema’s most adored love triangles lies at the heart of this irreverent story of the 25-year friendship between two young writers in pre-World War I Paris: shy, restrained Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner); his suave ami français, Jim (Henri Serre); and Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), the reckless free spirit they both love. While her name is not in the title, Catherine and her restless energy drive the movie. She is a woman who refuses to follow rules, her whims and capriciousness pushing her to marry one man, then change her mind and pursue his best friend. Jules and Jim fight on opposite sides of the war, but in this doomed romantic triangle it’s not clear if the emotional stakes are higher in love or war. As Catherine plays with the lives of the men she loves, so she takes charge of the film’s emotional tenor, which is as tragic as it is whimsical and swooningly romantic.
Also recommended: Shoot the Piano Player and Day for Night.
Cléo from 5 to 7, directed by Agnès Varda (1961)
The brilliant Left Bank Group filmmaker Agnès Varda was a photographer before she became the “grandmère of the French New Wave,” introducing the public to the unconventional filmmaking techniques the movement was famous for. In Cleo from 5 to 7, the black and white documentary-style camera tracks Cléo (Corinne Marchand), a stunning young singer, in real time as she wanders the streets of Paris while waiting anxiously for medical test results. Varda died in 2019 at 90, leaving us with a lifetime of some of the most profound, groundbreaking films ever made. Read about other great Varda films here.
Stream on HBO or The Criterion Channel.
La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker, 1963
Considered one of the most influential science fiction films of all times, Left Bank director, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and multimedia artist Chris Marker’s brilliant, philosophically complex 30-minute stunner is a time travel story told almost entirely in black-and-white still photos, with music, sound effects, and a narrator recounting the story. In a postapocalyptic Paris, where people are forced to live underground, scientists are researching time travel as a means to locating past or future resources that might help in their survival. A prisoner is sent back in time to a childhood memory that obsesses him, when he saw a beautiful woman at Orly airport rushing toward a man who is shot and killed. Through time travel, he is unable to discern the true meaning of the haunting memory. In 1995, the British director Terry Gilliam adapted Marker’s story into the feature 12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, and Brad Pitt.
Stream on The Criterion Channel. Rent on Prime.
Also recommended: A Grin Without a Cat and Sans Soleil.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy, 1964
Left Bank filmmaker and Agnès Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy, won the hearts of millions of viewers (and the Palme d’Or at Cannes) with this beloved musical, and its impossibly gorgeous actors, candy-colored sets, and music and lyrics by Michel Legrand. The film stars Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo as giddy young lovers separated when he is drafted to fight in the Algerian War. Their story is so achingly beautiful and sad, just hearing the Oscar-nominated theme song “I Will Wait for You” will bring tears to the eyes of pretty much anyone who’s seen the film.
Also recommended: Lola and The Young Girls of Rochefort.
My Night at Maud’s (Ma Nuit Chez Maud), directed by Eric Rohmer, 1969
In the third film in Rohmer’s beloved series of Six Moral Tales, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, a Catholic engineer with a strict moral code, who sees and becomes smitten with Françoise, a beautiful young woman he spots at church and vows to marry. The next day he runs into an old friend who takes him to the home of Maud, an atheist doctor and divorced mom. The trio talks religion, philosophy, and past relationships, and when heavy snow begins to fall, Maud invites Jean-Louis to spend the night. Over the course of one uncomfortable night, Jean-Louis’ morals are challenged, as he’s forced to decide what kind of life—and love—is right for him.
Stream on HBO Max and Criterion.
Also recommended: Claire’s Knee and The Green Ray.
Contempt (Le Mépris), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1963
With Brigitte Bardot as his leading lady and a stunning coastal Italian location, this big-budget adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel was the closest Godard ever got to making a Hollywood epic. But it’s all Godard. Contempt is the story of a disillusioned screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) hired by a pompous American producer (Jack Palance) to punch up the script for a version of The Odyssey being shot in Capri by renowned Austrian director Fritz Lang, who plays himself. Reportedly, part of the deal was to include nude shots of the famously beautiful Bardot. Godard took the piss, inserting random shots of her bare booty and building scenes around the exhibition of her lovely parts in a decidedly unsexy way. Godard focuses his lens on the tension between the real and cinematic, the result a charged, emotionally complex masterpiece about love in the face of the artist’s struggle.
Stream on Criterion. Rent or buy on Apple+.
Happiness (Le Bonheur), directed by Agnès Varda, 1965
Varda’s perfect film plays like a joyful melody that, with incessant re-listening, distorts itself into something sinister that haunts you in the night. In the deceptively simple story, François (Jean-Claude Drouot) and Thérèse (Claire Drouot) are a happily married couple with two young children, who love taking weekend walks in the country. Their life is dreamy, all sunflowers and Mozart woodwind quartets‚ until François meets Emilie (Marie-France Boyer). Film scholar Jenny Charmarette called the film “a horror movie wrapped up in sunflowers, an excoriating feminist diatribe strummed to the tune of a love ballad. It’s one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen.”
Stream on HBO Max or The Criterion Channel.
Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1960
Godard once said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” but he was being cheeky. The movie that woke the world up to the mad genius of JLG is so much more. His first feature—which turned American crime movie conventions on their head—follows Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo in his breakout role), a small-time thief who thinks he’s a character from a Humphrey Bogart movie and falls hard for Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American student, with her famous blond pixie cut and American-accented français. The doomed love story is as much about style as story. This was the first time anyone had seen the overwhelming cool that was Jean-Luc, auteur, in the film’s propulsive rhythm and jump cuts, its visceral beauty and crazy-romantic hotel scene—the slap, the teddy bear, the flirtation and promises—that goes on and on, making us swoon, hold our breath, and wonder how we’d lived without this movie all our lives.
Stream on HBO Max or The Criterion Channel.
The 400 Blows, directed by François Truffaut (1959)
Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical directorial debut follows young Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a rebellious adolescent who lies, steals, fights with his parents, skips school, and eventually gets thrown into a home for troubled boys. Antoine’s frustration and sense of being misunderstood is captured with a great honesty that has touched generations. Truffaut went on to make four sequels (Antoine and Colette, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, and Love on the Run), with Léaud playing Antoine as he grows up and navigates the turbulent waters of adulthood, but the original remains most beloved to fans. Akira Kurosawa famously called it “one of the most beautiful films that I have ever seen.”
Stream on HBO Max. Rent on Prime.
Also recommended: Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, Love on the Run.
Andrea Meyer has written creative treatments for commercial directors, a sex & the movies column for IFC, and a horror screenplay for MGM. Her first novel, Room for Love (St. Martin’s Press) is a romantic comedy based on an article she wrote for the New York Post, for which she pretended to look for a roommate as a ploy to meet men. A long-time film and entertainment journalist and former indieWIRE editor, Andrea has interviewed more actors and directors than she can remember. Her articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Elle, Glamour, Variety, Time Out NY, and the Boston Globe.
