With Nouvelle vague, Richard Linklater pays an elegant tribute to the young Jean-Luc Godard and the emergence of the French New Wave. In this stylised black-and-white film, Linklater reconstructs the making of À bout de souffle (1960), the iconic debut that would change the film world forever.

The film follows the 28-year-old Godard – idiosyncratic, sharp and desperately seeking creative freedom – as he and his entourage attempt to break new ground in cinema. With stunning lookalikes of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Nouvelle vague takes a loving look behind the scenes of a revolutionary film set and shows the struggle of an artist who dared to work against the grain.

Although Linklater himself remains surprisingly formal, Nouvelle vague is above all a precise, warmly nostalgic love letter to a filmmaker who rewrote the rules of cinema. A must for cinephiles and anyone who wants to see where modern film thinking began.