The Story of Adèle H. was released one year after John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, and despite huge differences in style, tone and setting, the two have a lot in common. Mostly, they have a similar focus, centering on intensely watchable feminist figureheads, whose irrational response to an irrational situation dictates the film’s entire action. Both Mabel Longhetti …

“What is a film director? Someone who’s asked questions about everything. Sometimes he knows the answers.” That’s the question posed and answered by the fictional director named Ferrand early on in François Truffaut’s Day for Night. Played by the storied filmmaker himself, Ferrand is presiding over a project dubbed “Meet Pamela,” a seemingly simple drama about the unique romantic entanglements …

Following the masterful adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché’s Two English Girls, Francois Truffaut must have needed to blow off some steam. After having been forced to trim back more than 40 minutes of that film after a critical drubbing in 1971 (he would restore it to its full glory years later), it’s no wonder that the director created his most confectionery …

Of all of François Truffaut’s greatest films, Two English Girls is perhaps the least well known and the one whose reputation has benefited the most from the passage of time. A critical and financial disaster upon release in 1971, Truffaut was so crushed by the reception of his film that he voluntarily removed it from circulation, slashing over 40 minutes …

Noah Baumbach wrote that Francois Truffaut’s Bed and Board is a “comedy about marriage, the desire to escape it and the craftiness involved in running from one’s own desires.” Given Baumbach’s similar views of long term relationships, it’s easy to see why that’s his takeaway from the film. But there’s a strong case to be made that Bed and Board …

 From the beginning, François Truffaut has functioned as one of cinema’s purest conveyors of the pains and pleasures of childhood. After ushering in a new wave of small, playful films with The 400 Blows, the director continued to apply a pre-adolescent slant throughout his oeuvre, both by revisiting Antoine Doinel’s adventures through various stations of adulthood and by shaping a …

Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director. Mississippi Mermaid is ostensibly a thriller, based on the late ’40s noir novel Waltz into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich – which was also the basis for the Angelina Jolie/Antonio Banderas movie Original Sin, if you can believe that. The premise is a great one for …

Francois Truffaut doesn’t want you to get to know Antoine Doinel. Admittedly, the idea may seem an absurdity, given the five films the auteur devoted to his cinematic alter ego, played in every instance by Jean-Pierre Léaud. But apart from the scrappy, mischief-making boy presented in the first installment of what is collectively termed “The Adventures of Antoine Doinel,” the …

François Truffaut’s landmark book on Alfred Hitchcock was released in 1967. By this point a revered director in his own right, Truffaut reached back into his dusty old film critic toolbox and engaged in an extended conversation with the Master of Suspense, the end result spilling out over hundreds of pages. After the tribute of this loving cinematic scholarship, Truffaut …

Sad-eyed Oskar Werner: thrust into a world of book-burning firemen and empty conversation, what’s a guy supposed to do? In 1966, under the care of Francois Truffaut, rebounding from the lackluster reception of The Soft Skin, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and its harried, book-loving hero Guy Montag (Werner) was given the Nouvelle Vague stamp. Several elements common to the New …