Day for Night

A crew is trying to shoot a melodrama called Je vous présente Paméla and everything goes wrong: actors fall in love, one of them drinks, a cat refuses to do what the scene requires. Truffaut plays the director himself. The title is a technical term. La nuit américaine is the practice of filtering daytime footage so it reads as night, known in English as day for night. The film is named after cinema's most basic lie. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974 and took three BAFTAs including Best Film and Best Direction. Roger Ebert gave it four stars, calling it not only the best film ever made about the movies but also a great entertainment. Its best-known consequence was ending a friendship. Jean-Luc Godard walked out in disgust and accused Truffaut of making a lie. Letters followed, and the two founders of the New Wave never repaired it. Who it is for: anyone curious about how films get made and about the daily chaos of a set. Who it is not for: viewers who will think it romanticises cinema too much. That was precisely Godard's objection, and it is not entirely wrong.