Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Courtesy of Netflix.

Blue Moon

Rating **** Masterpiece

Nouvelle Vague

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater represents a curious outlier in the modern American film landscape. For over 30 years, he has worked steadily, never going more than a handful of years without releasing a feature film, and in the process turned out a landmark stoner answer to American Graffiti, one of the most beloved cinematic trilogies ever crafted, and a still-daring experiment that would have garnered him multiple Oscars were it not for one man-sized bird. But between those works and his roughly nineteen other films lies a vast chasm of critical and cultural consensus (not that Boyhood itself doesn’t remain a contentious movie to this day), one marked by odds and ends that sometimes garner praise yet appear linked by only the most tenuous artistic tendencies. From my vantage point, Linklater has never truly left or been totally out of fashion: every time he’s made a few films in a row that failed to connect, he’s directed a Waking Life, Before Sunset, or Bernie that restored some level of trust in him as a continually vital artist.

Nevertheless, it feels as if, after a run of films inaugurated by the unfairly dismissed Last Flag Flying where few people felt seriously inclined to keep up, we’re in the midst of a Linklater renaissance, with Hit Man (2023) reversing a steady decline in viewership and possessing the magnetic screenplay and pair of lead performances that his recent films had lacked. Now, 2025 has found Linklater at back-to-back big festival competitions, with two films so congruent in their aims that it’s easy to forget that it’s the first time in over twenty years that he hasn’t written the script for consecutive films he’s helmed.

That being said, both scripts come from familiar sources, after a fashion. Blue Moon was penned by Robert Kaplow; though it’s his first screenplay, he wrote the novel that Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008) was based on, and this film correspondingly also takes place in roughly the same period on Broadway, in the orbit of another legend at a very different point in his life: lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), found on the evening of March 31, 1943 in the middle of a professional spiral as his former creative partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) is premiering his new musical Oklahoma! to rapturous acclaim. Leaving early out of artistic disgust, he decamps to the restaurant Sardi’s, where the alcoholic attempts to resist the urge to drink while engaging with Rodgers and his afterparty’s coterie of new collaborators and admirers, bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), and Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), a young art student who the “omnisexual” Hart has fallen madly in love with.

Unfurling over 100 minutes, 93 three of which appear to be continuous, Blue Moon uses what could be standard biopic trappings as a container for one of Linklater’s most potent explorations of time, here yoked to the dilating tendencies of a particularly strong-willed person. While Hart is presented here in a fragile state towards the end of his life—as seen in a misterioso prologue, he collapsed in a rainy street and died of pneumonia seven months later—Hawke, in conceivably the greatest performance of his storied career, summons every ounce of magnetism and cockeyed grace possible to rattle off long monologues, only occasionally interrupted by interjections from Eddie or enlisted pianist Morty, that convey the lyricist’s profound depths of feeling about art, Elizabeth, and his professional jealousy. Playing a man much balder, ten inches shorter, and seven years younger than himself, he is able to fully inhabit a wreck of a man, the most inviting black hole imaginable, whose rapid shifts in intonation, quick wit, and penchant for impassioned disquisitions on what beauty truly means repel and compel in equal measure. Early on, Eddie offers the idea of life as a play where 99% of the people in it are mere mute extras, and while Linklater and Kaplow don’t surround Hart with blank slates by any means, the pull that he has over all in his presence, and over the viewer’s perception of time passing, is so formidable as to make it seem that way.

The only person truly able to resist, naturally, is Rodgers, who Scott portrays across a series of three intense conversations with a politeness that belies the pain that comes with seeing a loved one gone to seed. His attention is pulled in a hundred different directions, but the emotion that simmers just under the surface, proud of his work and exasperated bordering on cruel yet always with an eye for his former colleague’s wellbeing, is tremendous, the ideal bounce-board for Hawke’s disintegration. Blue Moon above all else is a portrait of an artist stifled by himself and others, where emotions and compulsions have run roughshod and better put-together people are waiting in the wings. Even some positive notices for the film have lamented the unsubtle appearances of George Roy Hill and a young “Stevie” Sondheim, along with the resolution to a subplot involving E.B. White, but they make sense in the conception of Hart as, in his final days, unable to actualize his own work yet still incapable of not giving every part of himself away. What he’s ultimately left with is the good company that he’s always had, and the reminder, courtesy of the title song, that it’s not always the things you’re proudest of that will define you, and that it’s not the worst thing in the world to embrace it.

The subject of Nouvelle Vague probably knew a thing or two about that sense of legacy. The more contentious and unexpected of Linklater’s films this year, it follows (with much more alacrity) the making of Breathless, which I still hold as cinema’s Anno Domini. Trading in the stately widescreen and lush haziness of Blue Moon for handheld black-and-white, filming on celluloid for the first time since Boyhood, Linklater captures the time period from an early screening of Jacques Dupont and Pierre Schoendoerffer’s La Passe du diable (1958) to a test screening of the film that would define a movement, mostly wedded to the perspective of Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) as he scraps together a cast and crew for his own long-awaited debut. Like Hart, Godard here has a certain complex about his accomplishments relative to his peers, becoming the last of the Cahiers du cinéma crew to make a feature film, and the need to create courses through this knowingly flighty film.

I rewatched Breathless shortly after seeing Nouvelle Vague, and it illuminated something that feels key to understanding what could be seen as a crass appropriation of a revolutionary film’s aesthetics without the same rigor or intentionality backing them up. Something which can be neglected in assessments of Breathless is how much of a pure playground of a film it is, using the bones of a crime film’s tropes as a jumping off point for the other things that interested Godard, something heightened by his improvisatory approach to discovering the scenes to be filmed on each day. Though I’m sympathetic to the idea that some cows are too sacred, Breathless feels too unruly, too multi-faceted to be one of them, and consequently Linklater’s treatment of the early French New Wave and Breathless, while quite rosy and genial, feels entirely in keeping with Godard’s sense of play.

The script, though of course translated into French, is by Holly Gent and Vince Palmo, who also wrote Me and Orson Welles and Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019), and both their efforts and Linklater’s convincing replication of roughly what the time period looked and sounded like through an Éclair Caméflex (augmented by a great deal of set dressing visual effects) brought to mind the Pauline Kael quote about another, later French masterwork The Mother and the Whore: “It took three months of editing to make this film seem unedited.” The most obvious intervention is also in many ways the loveliest: virtually every figure involved in this scene, from Truffaut to Suzanne Schiffman (who gets a wonderful amount of screentime) to Jacques Rozier to Robert Bresson to Pierre Rissient, no matter how peripheral, receives a close-up and a chyron with their name. By the twentieth iteration of this, it becomes clear that Godard, despite Marbeck’s uncannily accurate incarnation of his presence and especially his voice, is not the sole focus of Nouvelle Vague, which is borne out by the final title card being given to mentioning the three-year-period in which 162 French directors made their first film. Linklater is most interested in capturing the spirit of this time, filtered through his own hangout sensibilities (also on full display in Blue Moon of course), a collective where anything and everything was possible. The day-by-day presentation of Breathless‘s filming, proceeding in fits and starts yet always featuring a moment of levity, an amusingly spiky interaction between Godard and Jean Seberg, and more than a few bolts of inspiration, provides the ideal exemplar of such an artistic calling, and in both films Linklater carries the torch with admirable dexterity.