Richard Linklater arrived at 2025 with a reputation for inventive time plays, warm naturalism and an affection for conversational cinema, and the year delivered perhaps the boldest illustration yet of that range. He released two very different films in quick succession: Blue Moon, a chamberlike biopic of lyricist Lorenz Hart that premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on February 18, 2025, and Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white French-language tribute to the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which bowed at Cannes in mid-May 2025. Both films returned Linklater to festivals and critical conversation, and together they posed a clear question, is this the work of a director repeating himself, or of a filmmaker reinventing his vocabulary?
A quick primer on where Linklater started
Richard Linklater grew up in Texas, learned cinematic craft outside the studio system, and became a central voice of American independent cinema with early films such as Slacker and Dazed and Confused. Over the next three decades he built a career on modest, talk-driven pictures and formal experiments — the Before trilogy’s real-time emotional evolution, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly’s rotoscoped flights, and Boyhood’s 12-year chronicle of a single life. That mix of formal curiosity and affection for ordinary people is the through-line into his recent work, which has alternated small, intimate stories with deliberate experiments in production and form.
2025: two very different films, one director
Blue Moon, the Broadway chamber piece
Blue Moon centers on the lyricist Lorenz Hart, who in the film’s frame of reference is reflecting on his life and creative failure during the opening night of Oklahoma! The picture is compact, theatrical, and performance-led, anchored by Ethan Hawke in a role critics called one of his finest in years. Linklater stages much of the film in interiors — bars, dressing rooms, a Broadway restaurant — and relies on long scenes of actorly exchange rather than montage or spectacle. The film had its world premiere on February 18, 2025 at Berlin, and reviewers praised Hawke’s performance and Linklater’s willingness to bring a stagey, character-first sensibility to a biopic.
Reception notes, in brief:
- Blue Moon opened in competition at Berlin and returned warm notices for performance and tone.
- Critics described the film as a textured, theatrical chamber piece that foregrounds performance and regret.
- On aggregate sites and in awards-season chatter the film registered strong critical support, with one report placing its Rotten Tomatoes critics score at 93%.
Nouvelle Vague, a labor of love for French cinema
Where Blue Moon looks inward toward a single tormented artist, Nouvelle Vague turns outward, reconstructing the 1960 shoot of Breathless and assembling a crowded, affectionate portrait of the French New Wave milieu. Linklater shot the film in black-and-white, largely in the Academy ratio, and the dialogue is in French — a deliberate choice that, according to the director, prompted real anxiety about reception in France, where he feared a U.S. director’s voice might be rejected. Those fears proved overstated: French collaborators embraced the project and the film premiered to a sympathetic and often enthusiastic critical response at Cannes on May 17, 2025.
Critical responses clustered around two themes: admiration for the craft of recreation, and unease that a tribute cannot quite replicate the original’s political bite. Praise centered on the production design, the energetic ensemble, and Linklater’s filmmakerly affection for cinema history. Skeptics argued the film plays safe by smoothing the more anarchic edges of Godard’s original, favoring reverence over radicalism.
A side-by-side look
Film | Premiere (Festival) | Language | Lead performers | Critical highlights |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Blue Moon | Feb 18, 2025 — Berlin International Film Festival | English | Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott | Theatrical, performance-driven, praised for Hawke’s performance, reported 93% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes |
Nouvelle Vague | May 17, 2025 — Cannes Film Festival | French | Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin | Meticulous period recreation, black-and-white 4:3 shoot, broadly favorable reviews, critics note affectionate but restrained homage |
Style, method and continuing obsessions
Linklater’s filmmaking has always balanced two impulses: curiosity about formal possibility, and devotion to character-driven storytelling. Blue Moon returns him to a close, actor-led approach, where scenes unfold in real time and the camera favors human reactions. Nouvelle Vague shows him doing the opposite kind of experiment: not inventing a new formal trick, but mastering an older one, recreating an era’s texture, aspect ratio and on-set rhythms with painstaking detail. In both cases, Linklater’s interest in time and process is central — whether the passage of a life in Boyhood or the compressed, chaotic days of a 1960 Paris shoot.
Linklater’s films have always been about time, and in 2025 he used time both as a mirror and as a microscope, looking back to move forward.
Multiple viewpoints: praise and pushback
Praise for Linklater’s 2025 output focused on craft, tonal range and performances. Critics and festival audiences noted a quietly ambitious streak: making a Broadway-style biopic intimate and theatrical, and choosing to tell a French cinema story in French, in black-and-white, in a dead-center frame. Supporters argued these choices show a filmmaker still willing to take risks and to retool his voice.
Pushback has been consistent but varied. Some critics said Nouvelle Vague, for all its technical fidelity, lacks the disruptive fury that made Godard so electrifying, and that the film’s reverence can verge on hagiography. Others wondered whether Blue Moon’s theatricality tethers it too tightly to a single performer’s energy, making it less of a full Linklater ensemble piece and more of an actor’s showcase. Across the board there is curiosity, rather than dismissal: reviewers see a veteran director testing different registers, not repeating a formula.
What this means for Linklater’s legacy
Two things stand out. First, Linklater’s willingness to work across language, format and tone undercuts any neat narrative that he has settled into a single mode. Second, the films remind viewers why he occupies a particular place in American film culture — a director comfortable at the intersection of experiment and accessibility. Whether award juries and mainstream audiences will follow is less certain; festival acclaim and critical conversation are more secure than box office certainty.
Quick takeaways
- Range: In 2025 Linklater moved from a compact English-language biopic to a French-language historical recreation, showing range and appetite for formal change.
- Actors: Ethan Hawke once again anchors Linklater’s work, while Nouvelle Vague leans on a largely new ensemble to inhabit historical figures.
- Critical response: Strong overall, with some critics calling the work affectionate and precise, and others asking for sharper political or aesthetic risks.
Closing perspective
At 65, Linklater is not repeating himself so much as choosing different tools from a long career to tell distinct stories. Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague sit on opposite ends of his stylistic spectrum yet share a central commitment to the atmosphere of a moment, and to actors who can live in that atmosphere. For viewers who have followed him since the early 1990s, 2025 feels less like an encore and more like evidence of a director still probing what the cinema can do, when it tries something new and when it honors what came before.