When film critic François Truffaut was challenged to put into practice what he’d been preaching, he chose to tell the story of Antoine Doinel, a 13-year-old wild child in Paris whose adventures were based on his own adolescence.

The second and third chapters in the irrepressible Antoine Doinel’s cinematic life: Truffaut’s doppelganger falls for a music student in Antoine and Colette, and is dishonorably discharged from the army and courts an old girlfriend in Stolen Kisses.

Truffaut’s alter ego Antoine Doinel further matures in this comedy about marital intimacy and infidelity, with he and Christine adrift in the matrimonial sloop, amid often stormy seas.

In the final chapter of Antoine Doinel’s story, Antoine and Christine have separated, and he is seeing a new woman when Colette (Marie-France Pisier) re-enters his life, and encourages him to write a novel.

Two young screen icons of a previous generation—Jean-Pierre Léaud and Lou Castel—turn in vivid performances as men who may be mature in years, but are perhaps more than a little emotionally arrested in Philippe Garrel’s film about the ecology of family life.

Jean-Pierre Léaud is one in a small group of French students who passionately debate the impact of Mao’s cultural revolution and what chance terrorism might have in triggering comparable radicalization in the West in Godard’s dazzling lightshow of slogans, posters, and revolutionary images.

Confined to a room for 72 hours, Jean-Pierre Léaud and ’60s icon Zouzou enact a psychodrama of sexual, psychic, and physical violence in what director Philippe Garrel called an “exorcism in front of the camera.”

Truffaut’s joyous love letter to the art of cinema is one of the finest films about the magic of moviemaking, and remains especially poignant for the onscreen relationship shared between Truffaut and Léaud.

The great Jean-Pierre Léaud delivers a majestic performance as the longest-reigning French king during his final days. Filled with ravishing candlelit images and painstaking details from historical texts, Serra’s elegant, engrossing contemplation on death and its representation is as darkly funny as it is moving.

A hairdresser (Jean-Pierre Léaud) becomes obsessed with the idea of driving his boss’s Porsche in an upcoming rally in this breathless romp, teeming with burlesque and poetic expression.

“I’m a renaissance painter looking for commissions,” said Godard of this project, which began as a gleam in producer Alain Sarde’s eye: Paris, pulp fiction, Claude Brasseur, Nathalie Baye, Johnny Halliday, and an aging Jean-Pierre Léaud (in various disguises).

Léaud is bandit Billy the Kid in this psychotropic western, which plays like Duel in the Sun directed by a French outsider artist. Screening with: Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (Jean Eustache, 53m).

Jean-Pierre Léaud plays an unstable, aging New Wave director struggling to update Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires in Olivier Assayas’s wildly inventive valentine to movies and moviemaking.

Jean-Pierre Léaud is featured as a slapstick tough guy named Donald Siegel in Godard’s harsh goodbye to ex-wife Anna Karina—a looney adaptation of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novel The Jugger, reshaped by the details of the Ben Barka affair.

Parisian youths play at sex and politics in Godard’s freewheeling portrait of “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” starring Léaud as a young, self-styled radical-intellectual.

Jacques Rivette’s radical scrambling of his 13-hour magnum opus is both a fascinating companion piece and a singular, sinister, stand-alone masterpiece. The film will include a 10-minute intermission.

Pasolini intertwines medieval and present-day stories about two young men (Jean-Pierre Léaud and Pierre Clémenti) ritually done in by their respective societies.

Based on a novel by Jules and Jim author Henri-Pierre Roché, Two English Girls plays variations on François Truffaut’s earlier film’s ménage à trois: a young writer (Jean-Pierre Léaud) falls in love with two beautiful sisters (Kika Markham and Sylvia Marriott) at the start of the 20th century.