Francois Truffaut’s first, semi-autobiographical film was a touching rites-of-passage movie which, despite not having much in the way of plot, won him the best Director prize at the 1959 Cannes festival, and the New York Film Critics' award for best foreign film. It teems with a sense of Paris street-life and has an acute sense of the agonies of puberty; it made a child star out of Jean-Pierre Leaud; and it's one of the best films to have come out of the French New Wave. |