Zoey Deutch's 2025 Drama With A 90% Rotten Tomatoes Score Could Win Netflix An Oscar

Since it moved away from its original DVD rental service structure and became a streaming giant, Netflix has won a whole bunch of Academy Awards for films like Alfonso Cuarón's "Roma," Jane Campion's "The Power of the Dog" (both of whom won directing Oscars), performances from Laura Dern in "Marriage Story" and Zoe Saldaña in "Emilia Pérez," and even an Oscar for best foreign language film thanks to Edward Berger's striking movie "All Quiet on the Western Front." Now, thanks to a collaboration between auteur Richard Linklater and ingenue Zoey Deutch, Netflix may well take home another statue (or two, or three).

Focusing on one specific era of the highly influential filmmaking period known as the French New Wave — an era that gives the movie its title — "Nouvelle Vague" highlights the making of "Breathless," Jean-Luc Godard's classic drama. In Linklater's film, French actor Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard, who began his career as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinema and became one of the most famous directors in the history of his native country, and Deutch portrays American actress Jean Seberg, who ends up working as his leading lady in "Breathless." (As in real life, "Breathless" was inspired by a newspaper article about a man who steals a car to see his sick mother; François Truffaut, director of "The 400 Blows" who's played by Adrien Rouyard in Linklater's film.)

"Breathless" is a defining film of the Nouvelle Vague period of the French New Wave — which literally translates to "new wave" and promoted experimentation rather than more traditional ways of filmmaking — and unsurprisingly, Linklater's movie about the making of this classic is also great in its own right. Deutch, in particular, really shines ... and critics think so too.

When Richard Linklater's "Nouvelle Vague" premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, it received a nomination for the Palme D'Or — and it also made it quite clear that Linklater's second collaboration with Zoey Deutch after "Everybody Wants Some!!!" in 2016 is another great union between the actress and director. In general, the casting for the film, which is sitting pretty at 90% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing, has earned a lot of praise. Pete Hammond, writing for Deadline, called the film's overall casting "exquisite" and, after praising Guillaume Marbeck for his performance as Jean-Luc Godard, turned his attention to Deutch. "Deutch is especially impressive as Seberg. There wasn't a moment I thought I was watching anyone else but Seberg," he wrote.

Elsewhere, IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio "Deutch wryly plays Seberg as a kind of mischievous backstage drama queen, complaining about the amateur production and its lack of sync sound to her disaffected husband, the filmmaker François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noé) — her first of a few toxic husbands." Legendary critic Peter Travers, on his own publication The Travers Take, gushed about Deutch's performance. "And Zoey Deutch, wow. A lot of performances are called revelatory, but what the former Disney star does here truly is," Travers wrote, even noting that Deutch's accent work — speaking French with a "flat American accent" like Seberg did — was "terrific."

As it happens, Deutch already picked up an accolade at the 2025 Savannah Film Festival on November 1, 2025 for its Breakthrough Performance Award, and it's quite possible that she could be a contender in either the lead or supporting categories at the 2026 Academy Awards (which are set to take place that March). So where have you seen Deutch before?

Zoey Deutch — who, yes, is technically a "nepo baby," as her mother is 1980s film star Lea Thompson — has been working pretty steadily since the early 2010s, appearing in then-popular shows like "The Suite Life on Deck" (the aforementioned Disney project) and procedurals like "NCIS," but it was actually thanks to Richard Linklater that she became a more prominent performer thanks to the ensemble comedy "Everybody Wants Some!!!" Deutch appeared in "The Disaster Artist" in 2017, one year after working with Linklater, and then in 2018 she got her biggest break yet by reuniting with her "Everybody Wants Some!!!" co-star Glen Powell for the (extremely good) Netflix original romantic comedy "Set It Up."

"Set It Up" really put Deutch on the map and proved that she could easily lead a romantic comedy, and while she's worked on other rom-coms like Amazon Prime Video's 2022 film "Something from Tiffany's," but Deutch has also flexed her comedic and dramatic chops elsewhere. Deutch is quite funny in 2019's "Zombieland: Double Tap" and also excellent in serious dramas like the 2024 standout "Juror No. 2," where she plays the wife of the titular juror, journalist Justin Kemp (an astounding Nicholas Hoult). The sky seems to be the limit for Deutch, and thanks to her continued collaboration with Linklater, her star might rise even more pretty soon.

"Nouvelle Vague" is streaming on Netflix now.