In his 2008 biography of Godard, Richard Brody wrote: "The seminal importance of the film was recognized immediately. In January 1960 – prior to the film's release – Godard won the Jean Vigo Prize, awarded 'to encourage an auteur of the future' ... Breathless opened in Paris ... not in an art house but at a chain of four commercial theaters, selling 259,046 tickets in four weeks. The eventual profit was substantial, rumored to be fifty times the investment. The film's success with the public corresponded to its generally ardent and astonished critical reception ... Breathless, as a result of its extraordinary and calculated congruence with the moment, and of the fusion of its attributes with the story of its production and with the public persona of its director, was singularly identified with the media responses it generated."[23]
The New York Times critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2010, 50 years after the release of Breathless, that it is both "a pop artifact and a daring work of art" and even at 50, "still cool, still new, still – after all this time! – a bulletin from the future of movies."[24] Roger Ebert included it on his "Great Movies" list in 2003, writing that "No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential," dismissing its jump cuts as the biggest breakthrough, and instead calling revolutionary its "headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society."[25]
As of August 2022, the film holds a 96% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 76 reviews, with an average rating of 8.70/10. The site's critical consensus says, "Breathless rewrote the rules of cinema – and more than 50 years after its arrival, Jean-Luc Godard's paradigm shifting classic remains every bit as vital."[26]
The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films.[27]
