Hitchcock/Truffaut is a breeze. It’s not a substitute for the book, but it doesn’t try to be either.

Truffaut's characteristic attention to detail highlights the movie set as the most fragile of ecosystems.

Jules and Jim, Francois Truffaut’s 1962 film, stands as one of the most acclaimed of the French New Wave of cinema, which is a little odd when you think about it. Though it is intensely representative of the brash, youth-oriented film movement to rise in post-World War II France, it also stands at the point in time which Nouvelle Vague …

At last, we come to the end. François Truffaut was many things through the course of his career: director, writer, producer, even actor. He was an innovator and an iconoclast, had both celebrated and subverted the tropes of cinema throughout his long and storied filmography. Like any other artist, he had periods of tremendous vitality and imagination (most notably during …

The Woman Next Door has a fairly basic plot of infidelity as new couple – an air traffic controller and his mysterious artist wife Mathilde (Fanny Ardant) – moves in next to Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) and his wife. It turns out that Mathilde and Bernard were incredibly passionate lovers in their younger days – until Bernard’s constant abandonment forced her …

Although not part of a concrete cycle like his acclaimed Antoine Doinel series, it is notable that his next film after the concluding Love on the Run (1979) was intended as the second part of a trilogy of films dealing with performing arts. The first, 1973’s Day for Night, dealt with his medium of choice, film, while the third, scripted …

Released in 1979, François Truffaut’s Love on the Run completed the cycle of Antoine Doinel films that began in 1959 with The 400 Blows and continued on through Antoine and Colette (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed and Board (1970). Although the entire series is currently available for purchase in a handsome package released by The Criterion Collection, the five …

It’s always tempting to look at the latter films of a director’s career through the lens of looming mortality. That may be an apt approach when considering John Huston’s last film, The Dead, directed when he was 80-years-old and confined to a wheelchair, but often it’s a foolhardy approach, gifting the creative talent with an improbable understanding of the arc …

For François Truffaut, the fundamental problem with humanity is maturity, the process of letting go of the sense of wonder and awe that fills childhood in favor of the stark rationality of adulthood. Though it is in some ways a lesser known Truffaut work, The Man Who Loved Women is the perfect representation of Truffaut’s argument against maturity, a comedy …

François Truffaut was on a bit of a roll in 1976. He’d had a major international success in 1973 with Day For Night, which brought back the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and The Story of Adele H. (1975), while not as extravagantly successful as its predecessor, still fared very well with the critics. This must have come …