François Truffaut once ordered a hitchhiker out of his car for admitting he did not care for movies. That uncompromising devotion to cinema began in a miserable Paris childhood: born to an unmarried mother in 1932 and hidden from society, he lost his beloved grandmother at eight, was shunted into a frigid home with his mother and stepfather, and escaped by sneaking into movie theaters, setting himself a curriculum of three films a day and three books a week. This episode traces how a juvenile delinquent rescued from military prison by critic André Bazin became the most feared critic in France, was banned from the Cannes Film Festival, and then won its top directing prize a year later with his fiercely autobiographical 1959 debut.

Along the way we explore the auteur theory he championed, the birth of the French New Wave, his disastrous Engli ...