With the important exception of Stolen Kisses, [Love on the Run, the Saga of Antoine Doinel's] love life through three and a half films is, to me, the least appealing of Francois Truffaut's glorious output…. The director loses some of his magic when faced with his alter ego….

[Love on the Run] has individual scenes which no other director in the history of the cinema could achieve with such elegant, heart-stopping, comic authority….

For all the tenderness and objectivity which Truffaut allows his hero, Doinel remains little more than a posturing, skirt-chasing, pretentious man—a nightmare Parisian whose arrogance is coated in self-pity. Nor, curiously, does he show any of the conventionally neurotic signs of a child who has suffered in the way we saw in Les Quatre Cents Coups. His only insecurity seems to be the highly conventional one of possessing a well developed libido…. The girls...