Blu-ray Film Review

Breathless (1960) • 60th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray [StudioCanal]

A thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle cop, fleeing the police to Italy with a hip American journalism student…

Frequently appearing in lists of the all-time greatest movies, Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature Breathless / A Bout de Souffle remains as fresh and startling today as 60 years ago. It’s a non-stop careen through the daily life of a small-time French crook and his younger, wiser American girlfriend, shot in the documentary style of the French New Wave (which Godard helped create), but also, self-consciously, owing much to the Hollywood gangster drama.

Above all, it’s cool, and not only by today’s nostalgic standards. As Jefferson Hack says in one of the extras on this 60th anniversary Blu-ray, it’s a movie of cigarettes, sunglasses, and fast talking — all things we associate with the period. But it also salutes the emblems of coolness in 1960 itself; things that we might have forgotten, like the sleek models of jetliners in travel agents’ offices, or the glamour of…