Nouvelle Vague

Within the same twelve months as the equally delicious Blue Moon, Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Before Sunrise) has turned his eye to the generation who revolutionised cinema in the 1960s: the French New Wave. Set during the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s (Guillaume Marbeck) era-defining Breathless, in which the young gun director casts Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin). Armed with the knowledge that ‘all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun’ they set out on a scrappy journey to stardom.

It definitely takes chutzpah to stand among the pantheon of Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and François Truffaut, yet Linklater does a terrific job of embodying the spirit of the time: puckish, arrogant, effortlessly stylish and seen through a haze of Gauloises smoke. To its credit, seismic influence the directors never feels like a fixed destination: these are just young people who happen to be writing with lightning.