“Breathless still feels entirely original. It still has the power to defy conventional expectations about what a movie should be while providing an utterly captivating moviegoing experience... Much as it may have influenced what was to come later, there is still nothing quite like it.
Even at 50, it is still cool, still new!”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times. Click here to read complete article


“REVELATORY! The images yield up details
hitherto imperceptible in the prints that were available until now.
THIS RESTORATION PROVIDED A WELCOME JOLT OF THE NEW!”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker. Click here to read full review

“TOP PICK: WHAT WE LOVE THIS WEEK!”
– New York Observer
“FIFTY YEARS ON, STILL THE NEWEST MOVIE IN TOWN!”
– John Powers, Vogue. Click here to read full review


[FIVE STARS - HIGHEST RATING]
“A SUMMER MOVIE MUST-SEE!"
“In this stunning new print, you can better embrace the excitement of a pretender in a fantasy land. If you miss out on this print, you are truly missing out on another life.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York. Click here to read full review

“CRITICS PICK! It's not hyperbole to say that Godard's New Wave touchstone,
still one of the most electrifying debuts in history, changed cinema forever.”
– New York magazine

“THE RESTORATION OPENS A NEW WORLD OF VISUAL DELIGHT!”
– Nathan Heller, Slate. Click here to read full review

“MORE VIBRANT THAN EVER! Movie history and cultural politics vibrate throughout Breathless... Indeed, it is breathtaking.”
– Armond White, New York Press. Click here to read full review

“Breathless hasn't aged by one second. How is is possible that on its fiftieth anniversary this film remains as fresh as on the day it came out of the lab? When Jean Seberg appears in close-up, you see the freckles on her nose... evidence of the randomness and grubiness of ordinary life was still routinely scrubbed out the movies; but here, it's presented throughout, and in the coolest, chicest form it will ever take.”
– Stuart Klawans, The Nation

“Breathless feels like it was made tomorrow or like it was a bulletin from the future of movies;
there's this amazing freshness and spontaneity.”
– At the Movies. Click here to watch the clip

“Made with such exceptional energy that it retains its freshness and élan 50 years later... And if there is one thing that hasn't dated a bit, it's the star power of Belmondo and Seberg, he the picture of drop-dead hipster insouciance and she, the ultimate innocent siren. Seeing them puts you in mind of one of Breathless's most famous quotes, when Melville's character says his goal is 'to become immortal and then die.' This is one cast and one film that has achieved exactly that.”
– Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

“HAS LOST NONE OF ITS EUPHORIC BUZZ! Breathless is often called timeless, but it is more precise to say that, with its offhandedly cool gestures and quotations, its anarchic streak, its startling sense of possibility and delight, the film is eternally youthful. The ultimate expression of a life so steeped in movies that the two were indistinguishable, Breathless marks the birth of modern cinephilia, perhaps even the start of the modern media age.”
– Dennis Lim, PBS "Need to Know." Click here to read full review

“One of the most famous and influential movies ever made. Most so-called 'revolutionary' movies do not age well
but Breathless still leaps off the screen. A seminal movie for filmmakers and critics alike!”
– Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor. Click here to read full review

“Forever changed the ways we look at film, the way moviemakers shot movies and critics wrote about it,
and perhaps changed the ways we look at life too. It’s a movie-lovers anti-movie, or counter-movie,
a defiant act of rebellion by a director who knows the score and deliberately breaks the rules.”
– Michael Wilmington, Movie City News. Click here to read full review

“Breathless comes from a place of jittery excitement and possibility, the double vision of appreciating so deeply the riches of cinema's past and seeing so vividly what shape its future could take... Such a blast of high-wire artistry can justifiably be deemed 'fresh' by today's standards. Watching it, however, you cannot help but reach for another overused yet occasionally perfect descriptor: timeless.”
– Matthew Connolly, SLANT Magazine. Click here to read full review

“Casually violent and casually sexual, this startling film–with its seemingly spontaneous action, and jumpy shooting style,
and its original hero and heroine–was intoxicating.
The power of Breathless remains undiminished... an utterly modern, edgy new way of looking at the world.”
– Patricia Zohn, The Huffington Post. Click here to read full review

“A thrilling reminder of how playful Godard could be... With its jazzy, staccato rhythms and endless referencing
of other films and filmmakers, Breathless makes alienation look like it was a lot more fun in 1960
than in the ponderous gravitas or ante-upping brutality of indie film today.”
– Ella Taylor, The Village Voice. Click here to read full review

Breathless window cards (18.5 x 12 in) designed by Japanese illustrator Yoko Komura.

See the BREATHLESS window at Barneys (Madison Avenue), featuring new Herald Tribune t-shirts designed by Rodarte.   ABOUT THE RESTORATION “I’ve seen the fiftieth-anniversary restoration Breathless, and it’s revelatory; the images, restored under the supervision of the film’s cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, yield up details hitherto imperceptible in the prints that were available until now, as if layers of varnish had come off to show Coutard’s own brushwork. Keeping a close eye on the timings—the brightness of each scene, each shot—he elicits a dark, contrasty, charcoal-like palette that seems to reflect the now-familiar stories of Godard’s unusual methods (they used hardly any movie lighting, even indoors; shot on the street at night with high-speed still-camera film; filmed in direct sunlight; worked mainly with a hand-held camera of the sort more often used for newsreels). The soundtrack, too, is happily crisp and clear, and, for non-Francophones, the subtitles have also been redone and made much fuller than on earlier prints. I’ve seen the film countless times but am grateful to have seen it again in this restoration; I’m not able to compare it side-by-side with other prints, but this one provided a welcome jolt of the new.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker THE NEW RESTORATION (INCLUDING THE REVISED TRANSLATION) OF BREATHLESS IS AT FILM FORUM ONLY! IT IS NOT AVAILABLE ON DVD. A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE

(1960) “To become immortal. And then...die." Lip-stroking pug Jean-Paul Belmondo’s on the run, shooting cops and stealing cars — as well as cash from the handbag of thickly-Iowa-accented, Herald Tribune-hawking girlfriend Jean Seberg; with the typically Gallic undertone of femmes vs. hommes as the couple engage in boudoir philosophy, staring contests, sous blanket tussles, and plenty of le smoking. Erstwhile Cahiers du Cinéma critic Godard’s début feature turned a sketchy outline from critical confrère François Truffaut into one of the benchmarks of the New Wave, seemingly reinventing the cinema itself, and immediately rocketing Belmondo (in his ninth film) and Seberg (here beginning her European eminence following two Preminger flops in a row) to world stardom, and beginning Godard’s decade of supreme hipness, of seemingly compulsive, and often outrageous innovation. The pace is non-stop — a better translation of the title is “out of breath” — thanks to the startling, then-revolutionary use of jump-cutting (when the first edit came in at 3 hours, New Wave godfather Jean-Pierre Melville — seen here as novelist “Parvulesco” — advised losing the subplots, but JLG instead did the unheard of: cutting freely within shots); while the “je m’en fous” attitude of both protagonist and film proved the prototype of movie cool that every would-be cinéaste still aspires to. This new 35mm restoration, with freshly revised subtitles by Lenny Borger, is the first in Breathless history. Approx. 90 minutes.