TV Guide Magazine

What Stravinsky's "La Sacre du Printemps" is to 20th-century music or Joyce's Ulysses is to the 20th-century novel, Godard's first feature, BREATHLESS, is to film.

BBC

The thin, conventional storyline is swept along by the imaginative, urgent style with its then innovative jump cuts, overlapping dialogue and handheld camerawork. A landmark film, it forever changed perceptions of cinema.

Slant Magazine

What remains most striking, and most moving, about Godard’s first feature is its sophisticated yet largely guileless faith in the filmic medium, a cinephilia untainted by smugness or cynicism.

The New Republic by Stanley Kauffmann

It is a film of flawless consistency and uncompromised truth.

LarsenOnFilm by Josh Larsen

Like Pulp Fiction, Breathless runs on pure movie love, even as its heedless editing and bursts of jazz were redefining the art form. If the picture feels slight for a masterpiece, that’s because Breathless is primarily about itself.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.

Film Threat by Sabina Dana Plasse

What makes Breathless a masterpiece along with its style is how Godard captures the overall malcontent, which still resonates with much of modern life as we know it and ultimately leaves us all breathless.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

Godard brought to the screen the jagged, intuitive temperament of youth in a way that nobody else had ever done before.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

Breathless remains a living movie that retains the power to surprise and involve us after all these years.

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

But the slickness grows mesmeric and the performance unexpectedly wrenching as each trip Gere takes in a succession of classic cars brings him ever closer to his fate, a fate sealed the moment he drops a gun on top of a Silver Surfer comic while speeding through the desert to the accompaniment of Jerry Lee Lewis in the same type of Porsche that James Dean rode to his death.

The New York Times by Bosley Crowther

Say this, in sum, for "Breathless": it is certainly no cliché, in any area or sense of the word. It is more a chunk of raw drama, graphically and artfully torn with appropriately ragged edges out of the tough underbelly of modern metropolitan life.

Time Out by Staff (Not Credited)

A wanton, playful film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy.

Newsweek by David Ansen

A very stylish and sexy film noir, a tale of obsessive love neatly balanced between exploitation movie and art film. [23 May 1983, p.54]

Miami Herald by Bill Cosford

Breathless, on the other hand, earns its style -- it uses that style against its characters, so that the film's good looks serve as background while the characters, trying to live up to the scenery, grind themselves down. 18 May 1983, p.B1]

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

Breathless has a lot of mindless drive, but it's also funny. It's full of knowing quotes from other movies and from literature - William Faulkner in addition to Marvel Comics. It's less a film maker's journey of discovery than the film maker's testimony to his awareness of ''cinema,'' and sometimes it's just too much.

Variety by Staff (Not Credited)

A suitably jazzy, sexy, entertainment.

TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)

In keeping with the tentativeness of the entire enterprise, the ending is one of the great cop-outs in modern moviedom.

Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard

Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.

Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr

McBride's presentation of Richard Gere is frankly pornographic, perhaps the only way to handle this Victor Mature of the 80s; Valerie Kaprisky costars—meekly.