Matthieu Penchinat as Raoul Coutard, Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg in director Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (2025) | Netflix
It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American auteurs, both steeped in film history. Both had films in the festival that were nods to an earlier era, the era that gave birth to the New York Film Festival in 1963, when postwar cinema was at its height.
Nouvelle Vague is a fictionalized, romanticized, and loving account of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s pathbreaking Breathless (1960). Featuring an amazing performance by Guillaume Marbeck, a virtual doppelgänger of Godard, Linklater allows us to be present while Godard breaks all cinematic rules and establishes a new type of cinema. Acting, continuity, script, camera placement, all fundamental parts of film are rethought before our eyes. Godard spouts off aphoristically all the while, explaining his vision of a cinema that rejects all that had been previously accepted and expected. The film is sprinkled with actors who play and strikingly resemble those who made the New Wave: Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, and Jacques Rozier. Godard has an encounter with Robert Bresson, who is filming Pickpocket at the same time Godard is making Breathless. Godard’s first feature film was central to a miraculous era that began with Italian neorealism immediately after the war and lasted through the 1970s. Many, if not most, of the films that made it great could be seen every fall at the New York Film Festival.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, an occasionally acute and astute portrait of a wildly successful actor as he confronts his past and his failings, both past and present, is lifted directly from another film from the golden age, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). Like that film’s main character, Professor Isak Borg, Jay Kelly, played by George Clooney, is journeying to receive a lifetime achievement award. Along the way, he witnesses key and mainly unpleasant moments from his past. He sees he was a bad father and the bad son of an even worse father. The film, loaded with clichés, is a pale imitation of its classic predecessor. That the decline of film culture means that few will know, recognize, and compare Jay Kelly to the original might save it from the opprobrium it deserves. Seeing it at the NYFF, which was a showcase for the kind of cinema Bergman represented (though he only presented two films there), brings home the decline.
Still, there were a few other highlights this year.
The Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value was a moving and masterful account of an aging filmmaker’s attempt to retrieve his past success and reconnect with the daughters he had abandoned.
There’s great beauty and enormous insight in Paolo Sorrentino’s subtle and moving La Grazia. The Romanian Radu Jude had two films in the festival, one of them, Dracula, a purposely obscene and offensive three-hour monstrosity, the other, Kontinental 25, more in Jude’s usual vein, a bitter, vicious, uncompromising attack on the nationalism and racism of his native country.
The Brazilian Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent recreates the suffocating atmosphere of fear and terror of Brazil’s years of military dictatorship as effectively as Walter Salles’s Academy Award–winning I’m Still Here did in 2024.
Linklater also had two films in this festival; his second, Blue Moon, features an actorly tour de force by Ethan Hawke as the songwriter Lorenz Hart. Gay, out of ideas, and alcoholic, Hart’s career is in shambles and his life turned upside down for love of a 19-year-old female Yale student.
Jafar Panahi’s gripping It Was Just an Accident is an angry and occasionally comic attack on the regime of the mullahs in Iran. Pietro Marcello’s Duse recreates the period that immediately preceded the rise of fascism while telling of the late-in-life comeback of the greatest actor of her time, Eleonora Duse.
All these films have distributors. None of them should be missed.
The festival programing reveals an important shift in the thematic material of film today against that of cinema’s heyday. An astounding number of the films revolved around the conflicted relations between parents and children. This was so striking that, after a few days of press screenings, I came to think many films were essentially an elaboration the first line of Philip Larkin’s classic poem “This Be the Verse”: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
Everywhere in the world, it seems, parents are in the process of producing children who will hate and resent them; every country is filled with parents who were neglectful and children who have never recovered from their upbringing. In films from Italy, Iceland, Norway, France, America, Germany, Spain, Brazil, and Korea—essentially, everywhere—filmmakers turn to this subject as a kind of catchall explanation for how fucked up the characters are, for all their—and perhaps the world’s—unhappiness. Jay Kelly was an absent parent for his first child, who hates and resents him, while his second child, who hates and resents him, while his second child, whom he smothers with attention, wants nothing more than for him to allow It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American auteurs, both steeped in film history. Both had films in the festival that were nods to an earlier era, the era that gave birth to the New York Film Festival in 1963, when postwar cinema was at its height.
Nouvelle Vague is a fictionalized, romanticized, and loving account of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s pathbreaking Breathless (1960). Featuring an amazing performance by Guillaume Marbeck, a virtual doppelgänger of Godard, Linklater allows us to be present while Godard breaks all cinematic rules and establishes a new type of cinema. Acting, continuity, script, camera placement, all fundamental parts of film are rethought before our eyes. Godard spouts off aphoristically all the while, explaining his vision of a cinema that rejects all that had been previously accepted and expected. The film is sprinkled with actors who play and strikingly resemble those who made the New Wave: Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, and Jacques Rozier. Godard has an encounter with Robert Bresson, who is filming Pickpocket at the same time Godard is making Breathless. Godard’s first feature film was central to a miraculous era that began with Italian neorealism immediately after the war and lasted through the 1970s. Many, if not most, of the films that made it great could be seen every fall at the New York Film Festival.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, an occasionally acute and astute portrait of a wildly successful actor as he confronts his past and his failings, both past and present, is lifted directly from another film from the golden age, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). Like that film’s main character, Professor Isak Borg, Jay Kelly, played by George Clooney, is journeying to receive a lifetime achievement award. Along the way, he witnesses key and mainly unpleasant moments from his past. He sees he was a bad father and the bad son of an even worse father. The film, loaded with clichés, is a pale imitation of its classic predecessor. That the decline of film culture means that few will know, recognize, and compare Jay Kelly to the original might save it from the opprobrium it deserves. Seeing it at the NYFF, which was a showcase for the kind of cinema Bergman represented (though he only presented two films there), brings home the decline.
Still, there were a few other highlights this year.
The Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value was a moving and masterful account of an aging filmmaker’s attempt to retrieve his past success and reconnect with the daughters he had abandoned.
There’s great beauty and enormous insight in Paolo Sorrentino’s subtle and moving La Grazia. The Romanian Radu Jude had two films in the festival, one of them, Dracula, a purposely obscene and offensive three-hour monstrosity, the other, Kontinental 25, more in Jude’s usual vein, a bitter, vicious, uncompromising attack on the nationalism and racism of his native country.
The Brazilian Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent recreates the suffocating atmosphere of fear and terror of Brazil’s years of military dictatorship as effectively as Walter Salles’s Academy Award–winning I’m Still Here did in 2024.
Linklater also had two films in this festival; his second, Blue Moon, features an actorly tour de force by Ethan Hawke as the songwriter Lorenz Hart. Gay, out of ideas, and alcoholic, Hart’s career is in shambles and his life turned upside down for love of a 19-year-old female Yale student.
Jafar Panahi’s gripping It Was Just an Accident is an angry and occasionally comic attack on the regime of the mullahs in Iran. Pietro Marcello’s Duse recreates the period that immediately preceded the rise of fascism while telling of the late-in-life comeback of the greatest actor of her time, Eleonora Duse.
All these films have distributors. None of them should be missed.
The festival programing reveals an important shift in the thematic material of film today against that of cinema’s heyday. An astounding number of the films revolved around the conflicted relations between parents and children. This was so striking that, after a few days of press screenings, I came to think many films were essentially an elaboration the first line of Philip Larkin’s classic poem “This Be the Verse”: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
Everywhere in the world, it seems, parents are in the process of producing children who will hate and resent them; every country is filled with parents who were neglectful and children who have never recovered from their upbringing. In films from Italy, Iceland, Norway, France, America, Germany, Spain, Brazil, and Korea—essentially, everywhere—filmmakers turn to this subject as a kind of catchall explanation for how fucked up the characters are, for all their—and perhaps the world’s—unhappiness.
Jay Kelly was an absent parent for his first her to live her life. Eleonora Duse has cast her daughter aside and replaced her with an assistant who revels in the role of replacement daughter, rubbing it in the face of the actress’s actual child.
In Rebecca Zlotowski’s mediocre A Private Life, in which Jodie Foster plays an American psychiatrist living and working in Paris, her now-grown son (himself a new father) detests his mother and punishes her for her absence during his childhood by refusing to learn English. Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 is the story of a family that takes in a depressed young woman to serve as a substitute for a daughter who has taken her own life.
A troubled and talented daughter in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, a successful but miserably unhappy actress, has never recovered from her father abandoning the family when she was a child. This character too, we learn late in the film, once attempted suicide. After she refuses to work with her father on his latest film project, he finds an actress to play her role; in a moment of partial reconciliation, the daughter agrees to work with her father after all.
It is only in the final section of Jim Jarmusch’s flaccid Father Mother Sister Brother that we finally discover parents who were loved and admired by their children. There’s a catch, however: They died in an airplane accident, so it’s only their shades that are invoked. The two sections of the film that include parents are, it almost goes without saying, cause for despair.
Fucked up families, then, were the focus of this year’s festival.
After watching so many versions of the same premise, I wanted to tell the characters to get a grip. To be sure, parents will fuck you up, but at some point you have to take responsibility for what you’ve done with the situation. Parents are neglectful, selfish, and self-absorbed, but so is everyone. Singling out poor parenting is less an etiology for present troubles than an excuse.
This focus on family is a retreat from what was central to the films of the 1960s and 70s in cinema’s main centers and among the important auteurs who once appeared annually at the NYFF. To give an idea of the wealth of great directors of festivals past, among those presenting films at the first NYFF I attended, in 1970, were Alain Resnais, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, Ken Loach, Ermanno Olmi, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Marguerite Duras.
The talent in that lineup is hard to equal. Characters have always been in crisis, but the crises in Bergman, for example, were of man in the face of God and the trials of male-female relationships. In Antonioni, it was man’s ineluctable solitude amidst an uncaring universe and society. Rohmer and Truffaut examined the intermittences of the heart, though family featured prominently in Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle. Fellini gave us the grotesqueries of life, Winders our estrangement from the world and those around us. Radical political content and form made its presence felt in Pasolini and the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Little of any of this is left.
The programming of the New York Film Festival is representative of the highest end of world cinema. Unlike other festivals, such as Toronto and Cannes, it doesn’t show hundreds of films, though it has expanded in scope over the years, and it’s impossible to see all the films it contains. This year’s festival crystallized a major shift in the filmmakers who could be the children or grandchildren of the filmmakers of the postwar wave.
We are all a mess, but the problem is not existence. It’s Mommy and Daddy.
Oh, how I miss anomie.
