This article appeared in the May 21, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025)

As I write these words, it’s day six of Cannes and I, like many other overstuffed and underslept critics, am feeling like the vagabond in the opening shot of Ari Aster’s Eddington: unkempt and muttering nonsense under my breath between coughs and cackles as I shuffle toward the Palais. This unhoused man, who’s on his way to the fictional New Mexican town where the film is set, is just a minor character in the Hereditary director’s latest, but his mad ravings set the tone for a movie about the collective psychosis that took hold of American political life in 2020, when the pandemic forced the world into lockdown and social distancing. With the self-congratulatory and smug Eddington, Aster conjures this still-evolving cultural zeitgeist in the shape of a satirical thriller centered on a bumbling sheriff named Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix)—a man inching toward a breakdown caused by mostly petty obstacles and exacerbated by his own incompetence.

Eddington’s liberal-coded mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is the town’s primary enforcer of the statewide mask mandate and is anti-masker Joe’s biggest nemesis; the town’s Black Lives Matter protests are led by a smattering of righteous teens who march around the town’s depopulated streets like characters in a Buñuelian comedy. At home, Joe’s mentally ill wife (Emma Stone) is being brainwashed by her conspiracy-peddling mother (Deirdre O’Connell), making her easy prey for a charming, QAnon-style cult leader (a slinky Austin Butler). At best, the film’s sardonic tone and western genre trappings call to mind the Coen Brothers—especially the finale, in which a bloody, thrillingly choreographed shoot-’em-up brings to life alarmist right-wingers’ worst nightmare. Aster’s insights into American culture, however, are as smarmy as a late-night TV monologue; his script is satisfied with simply identifying easily mockable types representative of the political moment.

These characterizations lack profundity (in part due to the fact that the most compelling players, including Stone’s Louise, lack substantial screen time). Yet their shallowness also, perhaps incidentally, feeds into the film’s ethos of insularity, which is made cartoonishly literal by the remote small-town setting (both Ted and Joe’s homes are situated on desert cliffsides overlooking their mini-fiefdoms) and the COVID-19 protocols in place (characters stand six feet away from each other and communicate through windows and glass doors). If the film’s sprawling analysis of the culture wars tells us that Aster’s ambitions have expanded considerably since the (more or less) straight horror of Hereditary (2018), its vulnerable male purview remains consistent with those of his previous features. Despite Eddington’s grand thematic aspirations, Joe’s fragile ego is at the root of everything that happens in the film, including his mayoral bid against Ted, his tensions with the neighboring Pueblo reservation’s law enforcement, his wife’s surrender to conspiracy theories, and, ultimately, Eddington’s descent into lawlessness. Phoenix’s edgy, ridiculous, but also oddly poignant performance makes this masculine spiraling entertaining at the very least. But even self-ridicule is a form of solipsism; the notion that emasculated white men are at the core of all of the world’s problems is a liberal cliché that, here, manifests as Main Character Syndrome by another name.

Given Christian Petzold’s international pedigree, many found it baffling that his new film, Mirrors No. 3, wasn’t included in the Official Competition, instead premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar. With his previous two features, Petzold had begun working in a minor key, departing from the melodramatic registers of earlier films like Transit (2018) and Phoenix (2014) in favor of wispier narratives steeped in myth and elemental imagery. Though Undine (2020) and Afire (2023) are, on one level, anchored to the everyday banalities of work and repose, they’re still charged by the director’s enduring fascination with memory—the way it haunts us and takes shape in our interpersonal relations; the way it blurs the boundaries between fiction and truth. Mirrors No. 3, which borrows its title from an early-20th-century piano suite by Maurice Ravel, continues this line of inquiry, and stages an uncanny familial drama that riffs on Vertigo (1958), with its doubles and grief-generated perversions—but sadly, without the edge or poignancy of either Hitchcock or Phoenix, Petzold’s first doppelgänger movie.

Paula Beer (Petzold’s leading lady since Transit) plays Laura, a piano student from Berlin who survives a car accident that kills her boyfriend but leaves her miraculously unscathed (save a cut on her back). The crash occurs down the road from the country home of a middle-aged woman named Betty (Barbara Auer), who rescues Laura and allows her to stay in her spare bedroom as she recovers. Betty proves to be a delightful hostess, providing Laura with fresh clothes, regular meals, and pleasant company, while the quiet farmhouse and its surrounding greenery are Edenic, isolating the mysterious Laura from the realities of her own life, about which we know almost nothing. It’s soon revealed that Betty’s husband and son—both car mechanics—live a short bike ride away. At first, the men are disturbed by Laura’s presence, but Betty’s husband, at least, warms up to the idea, and begins mending his relationship with Betty. It’s as if he’s reacting to a new rhythm and sense of harmony activated by Laura, which Petzold visualizes as a repetitive series of household routines (the morning coffee, the bike rides to and from the garage, the tending of the garden). Throughout the film, Betty and Laura are seen painting the house’s picket fence white—a symbolic expression of Laura’s restorative effect on the rest of the characters. In a literal sense, she makes the traditional four-person nuclear family whole. As such, you can probably guess whom Laura is replacing, making the climactic revelation seem like an underwhelming fulfillment of fate. As in Undine and Afire, there’s a mythological undercurrent to Mirrors No. 3, but it is Petzold’s slightest effort to date: like a magic mirror, Laura allows Betty to enact her deepest desire, conjuring a simulacrum of what she has lost. Yet a looking glass is incapable of producing fresh images, or fresh memories. It can only reflect.

Likewise, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is a mere reflection, mounting a sleepy reimagining of the filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960)—one that’s best suited to flatter those eager to worship at the altar of cinema (perhaps that’s why the film, which makes winking references to the Cannes Festival, has played so well to audiences here). Whatever linguistic challenges Linklater took on in writing and directing it in French—this is his first project predominantly not in English—are balanced out by a dearth of writerly ambition. The script strings together basic trivia about the French New Wave’s origins and its most prominent players to create a quasi-history of Godard’s rise and the creation of his breakthrough film. In this regard, it plays like a primer or pop history for the uninitiated, though it strikes me as naïve to imagine that this fan-oriented drama, replete with filmic easter eggs, might initiate new generations of cinephiles. Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) and his motley crew—including François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), and future screenwriter Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest)—don’t converse like humans; they’re fed lines plucked from famous interviews or from the treasure troves of cinematic lore, their declarations fashioned to prompt satisfied recognition. The performances are, for the most part, solid impersonations (with the exception of Aubry Dullin’s gooberish Jean-Paul Belmondo and Zoey Deutch’s Jean Seberg, who, perhaps on purpose, performs with the mannered air of the American starlet herself), which underscores Nouvelle Vague’s off-the-shelf feel. Indeed, there’s an artifice to the film that doesn’t seem entirely intentional. Each character is presented with a subtitle and a frontal portrait shot like the players in one of Wes Anderson’s dollhouse ensembles, which only makes the large number of real (and often less-familiar) figures introduced by this method feel even more depersonalized.

At best, Linklater’s homage is a great technical achievement; its textured black-and-white visuals are far more evocative of French New Wave filmmaking than past whimsical efforts at Cannes to resurrect Godard and his milieu (namely Michel Hazanavicius’s 2017 biopic Godard Mon Amour). The film’s stripped-down approach, its use of period-appropriate equipment (such as the whirring Cameflex camera utilized by Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard in 1960), and its employment of Breathless’s style and techniques (the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, jump cuts, and location shooting) give it the feel of a moving mausoleum and a paean to guerrilla filmmaking. The conditions of Breathless’s production were certainly unique, frustrating, and reckless (imagine the terror of working with an indecisive, 29-year-old self-styled provocateur who speaks largely in film references), but Nouvelle Vague falls victim to idolatry.

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and historian who contributes regularly to The New York Times, The Criterion Collection, The Nation, 4Columns, and other publications.