The Current Cinema - David Hare runs through his best films of 2025 - Richard Linklater and Kelly Reichardt star

 Let me start with the two best movies of last year. 

The four screens above show Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon wiping out the set with his performance of Larry Hart in Richard Linklater’s frankly dumbfounding six scene re-imagining of Larrys last Night in Sardi's to horn in for a moment on Rodger's new triumph, Oklahoma! with his new lyricist, the appalling but brilliant Oscar Hammerstein II, and Larry's loss to him. 

 

Coming as this does after watching Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague earlier this year, but made after that one, itself a totally winning and transparently affectionate song to Godard and 1960 from someone who loved and remembers it for those of us who lived through it and remember it too. 

 

With Blue Moon, I think Linklater has confected a six scene Kammerspiel in a single Sardi's set in a remembered 1943 on that night of the Oklahoma! premiere. The first fifty minutes are almost entirely a monologue in what might be the Oscar winner for the year, but it's more than a tribute from me to Ethan Hawke to characterize such a complex and paradoxical genius as Hart with so much finesse, never allowing the gloom and self-pity to overrun the brilliance, nor pure fancy free to undermine the razor sharp ear for dirty truths. His humour stands beyond everything and the delivery is up there in lights at the level of a Hildy Johnson/Ros Russell high speed soliloquy. 

 

Unlike Nouvelle Vague, in which Linklater so brilliantly and lovingly homages the cinephilia and the whole art of mise-en-scene, Blue Moon does a Dreyer-esque containment to the six movement structure of the kammerspiel and orchestrates the rivers of dialogue, all of it brilliant (because perhaps largely reported truth) with the sheer, simple grace of the cinema's most primal tools, slow diagonal tracks, tight close shots to medium close shots. Minimum resort to shot/reverse, constant and regular staging in depth to entail conversations and moveable lighting to encase and amplify the mood 

 

And of course the music. 

 

Kelly Reichardt's new movie, The Mastermind is another total surprise formally from Kelly for me if not quite at the smoothly-paced and endlessly rewarding movie about achievement, her previous Showing Up from 2023 in which the simple but painfully difficult act of creating art succeeds to give its own reward. 

 

The Mastermind spends the first half of the picture simply showing us the unravelling of a man (Josh O'Connor, above) who is both doomed to failure, but who it seems may have no other options in life. After the distinctive slow-cinema tempo of the first half the movie takes off into a catastrophic narrative disconnection for a man, by now alone without any badly needed love except for his remaining friend played by a wonderful John Magaro (with O'Connor, screen below). Magaro may be the last friend he'll ever have.

 

If you've got the patience for Kelly's pacing and quiet, clear headed and endlessly rewarding observational cinema this work satisfied me and moved me very greatly. Up there with Blue Moon for the year. 

 

Not everything in the USA is going to hell in 2025 if these two movies can come out of arthouse/studio streaming funding .

 

…and now some more.

 

Paula Beer, Miroirs No. 3

Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3. Paula Beer, as usual radiant, and joined deftly if too late in the piece by the very appealing Enno Trebs with whom she was coupled initially in Petzold’s last film Afire/Rote Himmel from 2023. That film for me is a masterpiece. If  Miroirs No. 3 doesn’t come near its emotional intensity and impact, I can only think Petzold wanted to make a return to his blurred and displaced/missing identities pictures from earlier titles like Barbara and Phoenix. Regardless, I’ll watch everything he makes.

 

And a callout for del Toro’s big, blousy Frankenstein. What can I say? Oscar Isaac gives a characterization of the doctor that puts him beyond Oscar territory. Like Ethan Hawke, albeit somewhat younger, Isaac really is a dedicated actor’s actor, peerless in appeal - the first movie I watched him in was the Coen’s very fine Inside Llewyn Davis. I also found him/find him totally babe-licious. Never hurts does it? 

 

Oscar Isaac, Frankenstein

Back to Frankenstein, is there anything more wonderful than Del Toro’s sumptuous love for and recreation of the sublime Romantic world of Gothic Horror. Is there any greater genre? And his work continues, with Universal that studio's fantastic transition of 20s Weimar Germany with all its magic and miracle then to America’s and Laemmle’s Universal Studios literally rebirthing the total UfA tradition. Del Toro’s new movie is not his best - I find a few too many gestural narrative steps that seem redundant to the pacing. But who else is doing this stuff anymore? And so well?

 

And a mention in anticipation of P.T.Anderson’s new gig, One Battle After Another which will be viewed when the UHD disc arrives next week.

 

Also running high, Ozon’s big return to seductively transgressive form with Quand Vient l’Automne. It’s as he were if in radical gay brotherhood with his younger colleague, the great Alain Guiraudie, whose hilariously subversive social undermining takes the bejesus out of French Provincial bovinity in Miséricordia in which only the old Catholic priest seems to get laid.

 

Quand Vient l’Automne

The Goddess knows the world needs all the anarchists and transgressives it can get in these terrible dying days of rotting, corrupt Western Societies.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison takes another look at NOUVELLE VAGUE (Richard Linklater, USA, 2024)

Nouvelle Vague, the new Richard Linklater film, has arrived. It is an Academy frame black and white effort, in English sub-titled French, claiming to present the break out film-making of the sixties as we follow Jean-Luc Godard putting together À bout de souffle/Breathless.

Lookalikes appear as the celebrities of the French film making scene - Jean Cocteau, (“Art is not a business. It’s a priesthood”) Jean-Pierre Melville in his cowboy hat or Roberto Rossellini hitting up his driver for a loan. They are filmed in the original locations in the Paris of Linklater’s After Midnight. There's Guillaume Marbeck/Godard’s contemporaries grouped outside the Le Champo display with a Jerry Lewis poster prominent, a script conference on a bench in Richelieu-Drouot Metro, wheeling Matthieu Penchinat/Raoul Coutard’s camera concealed as a baby carriage  down the Champs Elysées following Zoey Deutch in her Jean Seberg Herald-Tribune T-Shirt or the unit playing pin ball in (is that?) the bar where they launched into spontaneous dance in Bande à part. Visitors on the nude scene shoot include Georges de Beauregard because he’s the producer and José Bénazeraf because he’s a lech.  There is a nice moment where Benjamin Clery, their Pierre Rissient, has a camera set up calculated to film the Latin Quarter street lights coming on. 

Aubry Dullin & Zoey Deutch and the Arc de Triomphe

Linklater was clearly aiming at evoking Godard’s free-wheeling style, which was so electrifying to those sixties audiences I saw sit stony faced through the earlier, master-crafted classic French films which I absorbed with such enthusiasm.

Linklater is likely to bluff viewers who didn’t live through that era but I’m continually distracted by departures from narratives with which I’m familiar. The story was that Godard made off with Cahiers du Cinéma’s petty cash to bankroll his first attempt at filmmaking. Here he uses it to get to the Cannes festival. We heard Truffaut's credited original story for A bout de souffle was a handwritten page which he scribbled to provide name prestige from his bonanza success with Les 400 Coups to fundraising.  

I haven’t handled a copy of the film but wide screen was firmly established by 1959 and the film's projections that I watched all seemed to fit comfortably on that.  We heard that Godard’s first cut was stunningly boring, so he just went through and lopped out the bits he didn’t like, joining up what was left and claiming to have invented the jump cut, which incidentally was already part of the classic film vocabulary. Look at William Wyler’s 1958 archetypically traditional The Big Country! What about the nose job Belmondo got between his earlier Godard short and their feature.Throw in an inexplicable glimpse of Françoise Arnoul’s birthday party.  

History is repeating itself here when unknown Aubry Dullin and lively visiting U.S. starlet Zoey Deutch get to animate the original movie star characters. 

Guillaume Marbeck & Richard Linklater

I’m a fan of Linklater and I can see the appeal of his version to the director of Dazed & Confused or Boyhood  but personally I’m getting over-familiar with the Godard narrative - the Richard Gere Breathless, Kristen Stewart in Seberg. By and large, I find Michel Hazanavicius’ 2017 Godard mon amour, with Lou Garrel as a  cantankerous Jean-Luc, battling middle-aged celebrity, more convincing. He always struck me as someone disturbingly undisciplined, who lucked out because he recruited talented people like Seberg and Belmondo, Raoul Coutard and Michel Legrand and I don’t know that we need two Godard bios, while Agnes Varda’s beautiful study of Jaques Demy,  Jacquot de Nantes, is all but unknown.

Maybe I’d have regarded the uneven J-LG output with more sympathy if he hadn’t been unable to come up with the names of any of the Monogram movies he’d dedicated  À bout de souffle to, when called on, a plausible test of poltroonhood.

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For another report on the film click here to read Rod Bishop's thoughts

At the Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane Film Festivals and the Current Cinema from 9 January 2026 - Rod Bishop analyses NOUVELLE VAGUE (Richard Linklater, France/USA, 2025)

Christmas/New Year is a bumper season for cinemas, but you have to wonder how Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s loving tribute to the French New Wave, will fair in Event Cinemas at this time of year. 

Godard, Breathless and the French New Wave are probably not top-of-mind interests for most holiday punters, when they can opt for Avatar: Fire and Ash or a day at the beach, or the tennis, or the cricket...maybe not the cricket…

So far, Nouvelle Vague’s box office in cinemas has been minimal.

Made on a budget of $US10m with Netflix acquiring the streaming rights for $4m; at the time of writing this note, it has only had a cinema release in four territories: France, where it grossed $862,000; Romania, $11,600; Russia, $159,000; and The Netherlands, $53,500. Some ‘select’ cinemas in USA have screened the film to qualify it for the Oscars.

This Australian release will come before cinema releases in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain.

In Nouvelle Vague, Roberto Rossellini refers to the Cahiers du Cinema crowd as “a circle of cinemaniacs”. It’s an apt description of Film Alert 101 readers also, but is there an audience for this film beyond such cinemania?

Jade Phan-Gia as Phuong Maittret; Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg; Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard;
Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo

Instead of developing characters, Linklater has reduced everyone to a caricature, played by lookalike actors. There’s a solitary, notable exception in Zoey Deutch playing Jean Seberg, and she manages to come close to a three-dimensional performance in a film populated by two-dimensional cut-outs.

The lookalikes stream by: there’s Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Belmondo, Demy, Varda, Resnais, Rouch, Rissient, Melville, Seberg, Coutard, Bresson, Schiffman and de Beauregard.

But the high-point of this film is Linklater’s 60-minute recreation of the Breathless shoot. 

Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo; Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg

In pre-production, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) tells his cameraman Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) that he wants “guerilla” filmmaking. Handheld, no lights and no sync sound as he’ll be using the very lightweight and very noisy Cameflex Éclair, a camera Coutard at least had some experience with during World War II. 

Godard also wants Ilford film stock, designed for stills photography, not movies, and he believes it can be used by splicing the small rolls together for the movie camera. Coutard agrees: if the splices go through a projector, they should go through the camera. 

True to his word, the debut director’s frenzied guerilla shooting style, with no lip sync, drives most on set into bewilderment and despair.

The first day’s shoot ends after two hours, with Godard claiming “I’m out of ideas”. 

Day two and the cast and crew are in the Dupont Montparnasse café having finished shooting well before lunch. 

Godard deliberately disregards continuity; Seberg’s make-up artist is told to leave because “there is no make-up in this movie”; Seberg wants to quit on day three; by day five the script girl is asking Godard “Let me get this straight. Tolmachoff wants to play a gangster named Balducci. He didn’t show up so our publicist named Balducci, is going to play the gangster, but you’ve changed his name to Tolmachoff?” “Exactly” is the reply.

Coutard deadpans to Godard: “If they never let you make another film, you’ll be a world-class dolly grip”. On day six an expensive stuntman is stood down and Rivette gets to play his dead corpse instead.

Richard Linklater

By day eight, the cast and crew have an early morning call and wait in the café until Godard abruptly cancels the day’s shoot. “Maybe he’s quitting” says Seberg hopefully.

Next day, they meet up again in the café with Godard directing only one exterior shot before declaring “Let’s go eat. We’re done for the day. I’m hungry”. 

By day 10 he’s called in sick and producer de Beauregard finds him in the café playing pinball. “You can’t call in sick. In two weeks, we’ve had eight half days of work, some only two hours long”. He threatens to close the production down. 

They are not even halfway through the shoot, or halfway through Linklater’s recreation of the shoot. Somebody asks about the schedule. Someone else replies: “What schedule?”

For a film destined to be so influential on filmmakers and audiences alike, it’s a remarkably irreverent approach from a director marked out for greatness and blessed with an ego that would put the current English Test team to shame.

Godard’s jump-cut in Breathless revolutionized filmmaking, and he’s often mentioned as one of a handful of directors considered to have changed film language, forever. There’s only a passing reference to jump cuts in Nouvelle Vague, and it comes during a conversation between Godard and his bemused editors:

“We are not cutting any scene. We’re cutting within a scene…we’re going to cut what we can to create a new rhythm.”

“It’ll be choppy. Abrupt.”

“It’ll be amazing.”

“It’ll be disconnected like jumping everywhere.”

“Absolutely. Let’s make everything jump.”

Perhaps Godard’s approach to filmmaking is best condensed in his own words: 

“Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires four minutes of actual directing. I prefer to have five minutes work for the crew – and keep the three hours to myself for thought.”

Others mentioned: Marc Pierret (on-set reporter); Richard Balducci (publicist); Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (critic, actor); Amarilù Parolini (screenwriter, secretary Cahiers du Cinema); Michel Mourlet (critic); Pierre Kast (screenwriter, director); Claude Mauriac (essayist); Jacques Rozier (screenwriter, director); André Labarthe (actor, producer); Françoise Arnoul (actress); Juliet Greco (singer, actress); Jean Cocteau; Liliane David (actress); Georges Sadoul (critic); Pierre Braunberger (producer); José Bénazéraf (erotic filmmaker); Phuong Maittret (make-up); Daniel Boulanger (novelist); Michel Fabre (writer)