"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". 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."