In 1983, Jim McBride attempted an English-language remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 cinema landmark, Breathless with Richard Gere. It broke one of Godard’s cardinal rules: It was in color. Although not as terrible an idea as Gus Van Sant’s disastrous shot-by-shot 1998 color remake of Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho — which, like Godard’s forever-influential movie the year before, also broke all the rules of its genre — it is dismissed today with the original still finding new life with young audiences each generation, as France’s New Wave also continues to do.

With the truly wonderful Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), premiering today in Competition at Cannes (where else?), Richard Linklater smartly has not attempted a remake of Breathless but rather a certain regard and respect for the wildly creative cinematic period Godard and his contemporaries achieved with the French New Wave. A cinema revolutionary in spirit and deed himself — just watch his...