Many filmmakers pretend that they never see anything, which has always seemed odd to me.

He was a member of the French New Wave a group that included François Truffaut Jean-Luc Godard Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol who all began their careers as film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and gained international recognition as film directors in the 1960s (though Rivette perhaps had greater success and recognition as a filmmaker in the 1970s). In 1998 Entertainment Weekly ranked the film 99 in a list of the 100 greatest films ever made and David Thomson called it "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane". Inspired by Jean Cocteau's book on the making of La Belle et la Bête Rivette made his first short film Aux Quatre Coins in 1949.

Film critic Raphaël Bassan has said that Rivette is "the only filmmaker of the ex-New Wave—along with Godard—who keeps making truly personal work on the level of film while his colleagues from the early days have long rejoined the ranks of the qualité française [mainstream French films]" Francois Truffaut said that the French New Wave happened because of Rivette and Marc Chevrie has called Rivette "vaguely legendary but largely unknown. As a film critic he expressed his admiration for popular American cinema especially genre directors such as Robert Aldrich Otto Preminger Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Tashlin. His films often combine the paranoid and conspiratorial crime stories of films by Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang with the more carefree characters of the films of Jean Renoir and Howard Hawks.