I consider Vivre sa Vie [My Life to Live] to be not only Godard's most mature and most personal film, but also something of a masterpiece. The full range of the cinematic vocabulary which he spread out in his earlier films with the vivid and random excitement of a child learning to talk is here applied with a rigorous economy and exactness which show his complete and imaginative mastery of the medium, together with a new element of repose….

[Like A Bout de Souffle, Vivre sa Vie has a thriller-novelette basis.] But where it is possible to appreciate A Bout de Souffle unexactingly on a "B" film plane, as an excitingly told tale, I doubt whether anyone could, or would, sit through Vivre sa Vie on this level. Although the value and originality of A Bout de Souffle lies in its thick texture and its flashes below the...