When Truffaut made THE 400 BLOWS, he was in his mid-20s and for years had been churning out unforgiving reviews as a film critic (his critiques were devastating enough that he was not invited to the Cannes Film Festival in 1958). His audacious, autobiographical debut (which won him the Best Director at Cannes the very next year), following the young Antoine as he wanders the streets of Paris, is considered a defining film of the French New Wave and remains one of the most studied films of all time. In contrast, perhaps unfairly, his final film, in which a luminous Fanny Ardant plays an accidental private detective after her boss’s wife is murdered, is considered an unremarkable mystery that pales in comparison to his debut feature. If CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS had not been Truffaut’s final film (he died a year after it was released, with numerous films in pre-production), perhaps audiences would have recognized it for the thoroughly enjoyable homage to the director’s friend Alfred Hitchcock, instead of a film that could never live up to the significance of his debut work.