In fact, he released two films in 2025, Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon, and together they offer two sides of a coin reflecting on the creative process and the shifting values of art. I view them, in tandem, as an ego-less take on something like Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans or Damien Chazelle’s Babylon: an investigation of storytellers examining the past and future, considering why stories matter in the first place, and finding some insights about what their art forms mean for the souls of creators. One is mournful at a rusting era and skeptical of what comes next; the other is enthusiastic about youth and infectious about the future. Nouvelle Vague is, in case it is not obvious, the latter.

The film dramatizes Jean-Luc Godard’s creation of the seminal 1960 film Breathless, a film that I love as a spine-crushingly cool piece of adventurous experimentation and smack to the face of stodgy old Hollywood, and also find moderately frustrating as a coherent piece of storytelling. The fun irony is that Nouvelle Vague is almost antithetical to the spirit of Breathless: It’s a cheery, old-fashioned, put-on-a-show story about the making of a film that, 65 years later, has become a part of an old-fashioned canon. Linklater captures the frantic, improvisational energy of the late-50s Parisian film scene without falling into parody. His razor-sharp, immersive slacker mode — the same one that made Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!! feel like hanging out with the most interesting people you’d meet at a party — translates surprisingly well to the bohemian spirit of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd.

Guillaume Eloy’s portrayal of Jean-Luc Godard is one of the film’s biggest strengths, balancing the director’s notorious arrogance with a hidden, vulnerable creative anxiety to very inviting effect. (It does not change my belief that Godard was surely one of the most insufferable people on the planet in real life.) Eloy combines the man and the myth of Godard, an excellent performance. Equally impressive is Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), who is the sympathetic heart of the film; she captures the isolation of an American actress navigating a foreign, male-dominated circle. Deutch, always a shining light, does subtle, empathetic work here, and the film is smart enough to use her congeniality (and exasperation) as a counter-balance to the “Great Man” mythology it’s otherwise having such a blast recreating. The actors playing the Cahiers group have great chemistry: Godard, Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Rivette (Jonas Marmy), Rohmer (Come Thieulin), Chabrol (Antoine Besson) all generating a believable sense of artistic brotherhood (and, with Roxane Rivere as Agnes Varda, occasional sisterhood) that makes the long conversation scenes feel less stilted.

One downside of that intimate hangout feeling is a bit of a lackadaisical pacing. It takes almost a half hour for the filming of Breathless to actually start. (My wife tapped out after five minutes of French banter and insisted I could tackle this one solo.) This is, of course, Linklater’s modus operandi, but in the context of a “put-on-a-show”-type story, it starts to feel a little bit itchy. Also, as with plenty of stories adapted from real life, the actual scenario itself is not quite as interesting as the best fiction.

The visual approach by Linklater is delightful: vintage 35mm cameras for the “on-set” sequences and ultra-crisp digital for the behind-the-scenes moments, creating a jarring but effective duality. The film-in-a-film sequences really mimic the feeling of ‘60s cinema. Linklater’s use of long, unbroken walking shots through the real streets of Paris is a clear nod to the cinema verite style the New Wave adopted, and it gives the film a sense of physical space that few pieces this light in tone bother to earn. Graham Reynolds’ score pays homage to Martial Solal’s original Breathless jazz while weaving in a few modern electronic textures, and it mostly hits.

Nouvelle Vague made me want to immediately press play on not just Breathless but the entire French New Wave canon; and making you fall deeper in love with the artform is about as grand an an achievement as a movie about making movies can hope for. It’s not Linklater’s most ambitious or piercing work, but it’s got his palpable warmth. He makes even icons feel like regular people. It is, above all, an infectious celebration of people crazy enough to think they could change the world, and a vote of confidence that they were right.

Director Richard Linklater, one of my all time-favorites, builds the film around a single-night, mostly-one-location hangout: Hart stranded in a bar, holding court, picking fights, cracking jokes, and generally displaying that specific kind of tortured-genius spiraling where he is both performing and pleading for sympathy. The film is set on the night of the debut of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, a very un-Hart musical by his former partner with a new collaborator. This is not a biopic in its standard form, though we learn some basic life facts; it is, rather, a meditation on legacy and fading away. People drift in and out of the scene, but the spotlight is always on Hart, to the point that you can almost imagine the film as a one-man show.

And here’s where Linklater’s superpower kicks in: tone control. Somehow, Blue Moon is more than the sum of its parts, which is saying something as many of these parts are quite good, though a handful are frustrating. Almost casually, Linklater gives the movie breathing life even as he forces it into a stagey physical shape. That is, I suppose, a contradiction at first glance: vibrantly cinematic but also minimal and theatrical. Linklater lets those competing forces give the film a strange flavor, like he’s intentionally draining the environment of realism so all the arch energy Hawke offers rings even louder. The sets have the feeling of a liminal space like we’re Waiting for Godot. (Linklater’s biggest miss is the strange attempts to make Hawke look short through a mix of clever blocking and digital touch-up, and it’s always awkward and distracting.)

The movie rests entirely on the shoulders of Hawke, who is frankly the biggest reason Blue Moon works. He’s having the time of his life playing a man who is very much not having the time of his life. It’s an all-time sad jester performance, the kind actors pray for: sharp, needy, funny, pathetic, grandiose, suddenly tender in the middle of a rant, then back to weaponizing charm. Hawke is great at letting you see the gears just the right amount: how Hart is constantly adjusting the mask based on who’s in front of him. He makes the inevitable crash-outs feel like a kind of doomed emotional choreography. The character is exhausting; the performance is electric.

The supporting cast does great work, too. Andrew Scott is outstanding as Richard Rodgers, a man maturing and moving on just as his longtime partner is imploding. Qualley reins in a character whose writing is a little unsure. She simultaneously reflects some of Hart’s brilliance back at him, and confirms his biggest fears about obsolescence and fading away.

The script, by first-time screenwriter but long-time novelist Robert Kaplow (basing it off of some of Hart’s real-life letters), is a mixed bag in a way that’s sometimes fascinating and other times nails-on-chalkboard. When it’s cooking, it’s something special — barbed and melancholy and funny. Hart turns a brilliant phrase, then brings it back twenty minutes just when you’ve forgotten it. But the film also brandishes Hart’s obnoxiousness as if it’s adorable; at least, Kaplow seems less confident than Linklater and Hawke do in navigating that balance. The story also has some moments where it gets cutesy in that Forrest Gump way, but even more grating: Hart just happens to inspire three future cultural milestones in a single evening? Sigh. He gives EB White the idea for Stuart Little, George Roy Hill the idea for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and encourages Stephen Sondheim to embrace non-sentimental musicals in the course of about 30 minutes. Hart also drones on and on about his lust for a much younger woman (Qualley), and, I mean, fair, but it never quite threads the needle of allowing this obsession to reveal more about Hart’s inner life, so it gets exhausting.

Still, even those rougher edges often get smoothed over by the larger atmosphere Linklater is creating. The film’s best moments are some of its simplest, when it Hawke delivers a monologue and the film just sits with the Hart ache of it all. That alienating hurt he feels is the movie’s central subject: the terror of being brilliant and not feeling saved by it, the humiliation of needing people, the weird loneliness of knowing you’re about to vanish and having to watch everyone else stay.

The movie ultimately works, but it’s held back from greatness, just barely, by the ceiling imposed by the script. Still, Linklater and Hawke elevate it into one of the year’s better films, one I really want to love, so I’m inflating the rating below by just a tick. Blue Moon is both annoying and devastating, sometimes at the same time. It has a warm, very human Linklater touch, the sense that even when someone is complicated and dazzling and frustrating, they’re still a person. And thanks to that opening scene, Hart isn’t just lighting up the room with his silver tongue, he’s doing it with the faint outline of a ghost already rising off his shoulders.

Later in the film, Johnson is again leading a college class. Within the narrative, something has changed about Johnson: He is moonlighting as a fake assassin who needs to embrace his inner badass. It has bled into his daytime persona. Two of the female students whisper to each other in amazement: “Excuse me? When did our professor get hot?” And I was scratching my head. He was always hot in a very conventional, self-evident way! (The only person I can imagine pulling off this dichotomy the way it’s written is Sam Rockwell.)

Perhaps some of this is intentional. Hit Man, directed by Linklater and written by Linklater and Powell, spends much of its runtime considering the various ways we act out different versions of ourselves and how, or even if, we can tell which one of those is our “real” identity. And within that thematic framework, it is largely a meditation on acting, a thrilling piece of meta-cinema. Perhaps Linklater and Powell want us viewers to see Powell as a handsome man while his peers blindly view him as a dork, the reality and inner truth of the character obscured and performed on multiple levels. (Or maybe Glen Powell is just a beautiful man.)

I’m getting ahead of myself a little. Because what Hit Man really is, even more than anything pretentious as all that, is a terrifically entertaining mid-budget summer film that also has a brain on it. It’s a throwback: a screwball noir that gradually shifts from comedy to thriller across its duration. It’s a bit unquantifiable: sexy and romantic, but fiercely dark at moments; playful and cheer-worthy until it’s suck-the-air-out-of-the-room bleak (and then halfway back again).

Gary Johnson (Powell) is a college professor who consults on wiretapping technology with the local police force. One day he’s thrown into action as part of an ongoing sting operation: arresting people who try to hire hitmen. Johnson proves to be a natural, using his insights on the philosophy of human nature that he teaches to college kids during his day job to manipulate would-be criminals into trusting the fake killer in front of them. For each target he pursues, he crafts and inhabits the exact person whom that target would hire to inflict fury on their enemies.

This opening bit feels more like a procedural sitcom than an ambitious Linklater joint. It’s mostly an excuse for Powell to use silly voices and wear silly costumes. It could have run on the USA Network as an hourlong dramedy as part of a Friday night block alongside Psych and Monk for six seasons. But, before long, Hit Man picks up and transforms into something more special when Johnson forms an instant bond with one of his sting targets, a spurned and abused wife named Madison (Adria Arjona) who wants to escape her husband. This attraction puts Johnson in a tough spot in the moment: should entrap this woman with whom he feels immediate chemistry, or relent and give her an out?

Madison ends up falling for the hit man she tried to hire, though of course he’s not really a hit man. He’s not even “Ron,” the persona that Gary crafted for Madison. Or is he Ron? The longer he lets the facade play out, the more Gary lets Ron peek through in his day-to-day life. It’s not quite Mulholland Dr. or Persona, but the idea that we have different faces and they can all represent real but conflicting versions of our true self, much the way an actor creates a character who is real in that cinematic universe, provides a compelling thematic through-line.

I really admire Hit Man’s screenplay from a story perspective. It avoids the easy ways out of its various scenarios, always building to some new and more dangerous conflict, always letting the tension bubble a little higher. As Gary/Ron falls deeper into his relationship with Madison, the stakes grow in both his personal and professional life. Like a proper noir, the film is less concerned with defining and upholding heroism than it is letting its protagonists wrestle with shifting truth in a murky, morally gray world.

It all comes together in a scene so good it makes it easy to forgive any of the flaws and quirks leading up to it. The climax is a breathlessly tense two-hander between Powell and Arjona that not only pulls all of the narrative threads together but the thematic ones too: The layers of deception (and, rather explicitly, acting — to the point that there is script-reading) piling up and folding in on itself so that it’s not clear exactly who is saying which parts, what is truthful, and what they really believe. It’s just an immensely clever and satisfying scene, and would make my shortlist for best film scenes of the year.

As a filmmaking specimen, I’m less smitten with Hit Man, though I admit it doesn’t detract too much from the experience. Aside from his rotoscoped films, Linklater does not frequently stylize his visuals in any meaningful way. But they do typically have a compelling, well-staged look and feel to them. Hit Man is not quite streaming-fodder levels of ugly, but it does feel phoned in and haphazard in production for Linklater. I’m imagining a version of Hit Man whose presentation matches a neo-noir much the way the script does: something mahogany and rich and shadowy rather than run-of-the mill.

But the acting really holds up. Powell might not be a super-duper-star yet, but with Hit Man, it feels like he’s on the verge. (If only this could have been a wide theatrical release with a big marketing budget. I really think this could have done numbers.) Notwithstanding the previously mentioned issue of his daunting good lucks undercutting his loser identity, Powell is pretty damn great: funny and charismatic and sparking with everyone else in the cast. You are always deeply invested in his survival and his relationships.

Arjona has a bit less to do, but has a higher degree of difficulty, and she’s terrific. Her chemistry with Powell is outstanding. She’s outrageously sexy and alluring to the point you can believe that Gary would throw it all away for her, but she avoids being a generic femme fatale (the role we’d expect Madison to fill), with a bit more vulnerability and depth and self-contradiction.

It adds up to a fun exercise in blending throwback genres — part screwball romcom, part noir thriller, part Hitchcock double-crosser — while still feeling modern and fresh. It cleverly and expertly morphs in tone across its runtime. Powell and Arjona are great. I wish it had a bit more sparkle and punch, but it’s another triumph for Richard Linklater.

This is the third rotoscoped film by Linklater, following 2001’s Waking Life and 2006’s A Scanner Darkly. I frankly found myself baffled by the choice of visual style: I would have vastly preferred Linklater’s live-action take. It would only take a minor rewrite of the script to make it a “spiritual prequel” to his other nostalgia works: He did high school in the mid ‘70s (Dazed and Confused) and college in the early ‘80s (Everybody Wants Some!!), so elementary school in the late ’60s would have fit perfectly.

The argument for the rotoscoping is that it processes everything through a slightly dreamy filter, evoking the experience of fondly recalling childhood memories. I suppose this works; there’s something almost synesthetic about the experience. We float through a whole movie of bright quasi-reality scored to narration by Jack Black and a number of lovely (but not too obvious) needle drops. Nonetheless, I still would have preferred a visual style that felt a bit more substantial.

What the movie lacks is any edge or vitality. This is just a sleepy, hazy piece of chopped up nostalgia riffs. They don’t really integrate into a larger vision of character or themes. It is a “portrait” of sorts, but a tonal portrait of a specific time and community, 1969 in Houston, not a character portrait. Linklater’s knack for capturing specific details is persistent as ever, and very charming. But the lack of character development or richness makes it all feel a bit shallow; it’s not as immersive as his best hangout films and too loose to feel like a proper narrative. Just vague splashes of half-formed memories.

It also doesn’t help that the framing device fails to register in any significant way. Protagonist Stanley (Black/Milo Coy) is secretly recruited to be a child astronaut. It’s an intriguing premise with plenty of potential, but it never builds with any resonance or literary power; it’s ultimately a strange, somewhat inert, fantasy side plot to the otherwise straightforward reminiscence.

The production, overall, is impressive: Regardless the questionable value of using the technique, the rotoscoping itself is terrific and lively. It’s frankly the brightest and most engaging demonstration of rotoscoping I’ve ever seen. The voice acting is strong, with Glen Powell and Zachary Levi fun additions as NASA scientists, and Black carrying the film with his Daniel Stern-esque narration.

Much of this review has come across as mixed and cynical, which is mostly a reflection of the missed potential for this pairing of concept and director. The truth is it’s overall a genial and engaging film. I wish it was even more like The Wonder Years, which often had a melancholy underbelly and literary ambition with its coming-of-age retrospection. Apollo 10½ is far too snoozy and laid back to bother with either of those. It’s content to gaze with warmth, then move on with a smile. I did the same.

But no teen movie had ever embraced a lack of plot or character development to the extent that Dazed and Confused does. It’s ideological in its chillin’. This is where the Richard Linklater ethos took full form. I’ve seen this film described as “vibes only,” which is not quite right as a label. There’s too much richness in the cross-section of characters and the forging of their adolescent souls to dismiss it all as “vibes.” But “vibes only” is not quite wrong as a label, either.

Dazed and Confused rejects the idea that teenaged existence can be crammed into easily digested linear narratives. Consider the dynamic between Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), his girlfriend Simone (Joey Lauren Adams), and Jodi (Michelle Burke). Pink has clearly lost interest in Simone and connected with the likable Jodi. Almost any other teen movie would have Pink and Jodi get together by the end of the film — a mini Happily Ever After, maybe giving us some reason to hate Simone in the process. Sure enough, we get one scene of Pink and Jodi making out in the woods. But then Jodi heads home from the party, and Pink bumps back into Simone, and things return to the status quo. Perhaps Jodi and Pink finally get together before they graduate; perhaps they circle each other but never get the timing right, then grow up and move on. We don’t know. In the eyes of Dazed and Confused, it’s just one little thread of a huge, colorful tapestry of humanity that exists even at a small Texas high school.

The film has a complex relationship with nostalgia. On the one hand, it is a deeply nostalgic film on the surface. It recreates the thrill and the sense of possibility of a night out with your friends. Everyone here is living what most viewers would call the good-old-days: A carefree time when nothing mattered but looking forward to an Aerosmith concert and hanging out at the Moon Tower. Inside jokes, rituals, nonstop radio jams. Life is, from the outside, quite good.

But it’s not as simple as that: If the film is texturally pro-nostalgia, it is textually anti-nostalgia. Many of the characters are unhappy or nasty to each other, and this gives the film some much-needed edge to counter the rose-tinted view of the past. None of us were quite so generous and upbeat in high school as we might have wished we were. Many characters openly profess boredom and the gnawing urge for something more meaningful: “All I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life — remind me to kill myself,” mopes Pink. Characters engage in gratuitous hazing, not to mention Wooderson’s (Matthew McConaughey) incessant grooming of underage girls. However, Wooderson facilitates the Moon Tower party and is as gentle and non-pressuring as any adult partying with high schoolers could possibly be. He provides a reassuring voice to Pink that it’ll all work out so long as he keeps L-I-V-I-N livin’. Wooderson is complex and multitudinous, you see — just like the movie. No heroes or villains, no simple morals or takeaways.

All that makes the movie sound a bit academic and pretentious, which is exactly what it is not. Dazed and Confused works because it is so damn fun. It’s so unburdened and smoothly flowing that it almost seems too easy. (But if it was easy, there’d be a Dazed and Confused every year, and there hasn’t been one since.) It’s so joyful to watch these kids cruise from school to baseball practice to a party, always searching for the next good time. Linklater has filled the movie with so many energetic and fun moments that the film never loses its sense of delight, no matter how many times you watch.

Linklater spent a lot of time studying Cassavetes and the neo-realism movement. He takes the John Hughes template for high teen melodrama and turns it inside out. The dialogue feels unscripted and natural, as if these are regular kids talking about everyday things; the exact opposite of, e.g., the big Breakfast Club speeches. There aren’t too many jokes per se; they’re more like riffs. There’s no punchline to the Martha Washington “cool, cool lady” monologue by Slater (Rory Cochrane), but that means every contour of it is worth celebrating and memorizing. (Slater, by the way, is one of cinema’s great stoners.)

The script — and the subsequent near-universally terrific performances by the loaded cast — gives inner life and personality to no fewer than two dozen characters, and you could probably go higher than that. That’s one reason the film is so rewatchable — you can pick a new character or two to focus on each time through and try and dissect how they relate to the other characters and to the world around them.

As perfect as the script is, it might be only the third-most important contribution by Linklater to the film. We must consider, first, his production leadership, and, second, his direction. After Everybody Wants Some!! released, I read an interview where one actor cited Linklater’s “Wikipedia” brain — you give him a scenario or topic, and he could tell you, in depth, what it needed to look and feel like, and how it connected to other things. This results in films where every detail feels like an authentic treasure; the fashion, the styles, the gestures, the turns of phrase, all add up to a vivid world. He may not have designed every single facet himself, but his guiding vision holds it together.

And Linklater’s direction, his ability and intuition with a camera, is special, too. He gives every scene a tremendous sense of physical space that you want to hop into and explore. Whether he’s gliding through an arcade or peeking over the shoulders of a wisecracking circle of friends, he always make you feel a specific emotion or sensation with each shot. His blocking inside compressed spaces is incredible: No director I’ve ever encountered has done a better job at shooting people in a car (a sizable portion of the film), making it always feel realistic and spatially elegant.

But of all of the elements that bring life to the film, none is more important than the soundtrack. If there’s a film that uses a rock soundtrack better than Dazed and Confused, then… well, it’s probably American Graffiti. But if this movie isn’t quite so formally inventive with its use of musical diegesis as American Graffiti, it goes even further to construct a distinct texture for each scene with its music. Just like it’s impossible to imagine the opening Star Wars text crawl without John Williams’ soaring anthem; and even if you could, you wouldn’t want to — so, e.g., the lovely Emporium scene is not a fraction of itself without “Hurricane.” And that is true of, almost literally, every single scene of the movie. The radio soundtrack is the soul of the film. It’s tempting to list every of the three-dozen perfect needle drops in a bulleted list, but a few favorites are “Low Rider” during the sunset cruising scene; “Tuesday’s Gone” for the party wind-down; “Why Can’t We Be Friends” for the “air raid”; and “Slow Ride” for the unspeakably perfect and poetic final cruise down the highway. (Every movie that ends with a card driving into the distance is better off for it.)

The miracle of Dazed and Confused is not any of its components, or even the remarkable summation of them, but the way it surpasses that sum of its parts. It comes together into a sublime whole where each piece improves the other. This film simultaneously speaks so many universal, timeless truths about adolescence and finding one’s place in the world… yet gives us a perfect, tiny portrait of a specific time and place. There’s no better movie to make you feel young, or feel old, or feel both at the same time; either way, you’ll want to grab an ice cold brew and go cruising with these kids one more time.