“NOT TO BE MISSED! My favorite Truffaut effort... a masterpiece of the film noir genre.”
– Andrew Sarris

"Forty eight years later, retains an abundance of exciting (and excited) filmmaking... The quintessential nouvelle vague film, a blatantly cinephilic combination of vivacious voguing and soulful sentimentality. An appropriate flourish with which to conclude Film Forum's season of French crime films!"
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice. Click here to read full article

“Its freewheeling blend of fevered romanticism and classic noir never dates!
Aznavour is the last word in sensitive cool as the titular anti-hero.”
– New York Magazine


“WONDERFUL! More than nods to noir... the homage is invigorated by New Waver Truffaut's own flourishes. Aznavour is just as heartbreaking as [The 400 Blows] Antoine Doinel.”
– Melissa Anderson, Time Out New York. Click here to read full article

"COMPULSIVELY WATCHABLE! Boldly sets cheeky antics alongside downcast regret, darting chases next to chatty strolls, and grim art-house melodrama beside loosey-goosey hand-holding. As cine-mad and compressed in its way as Godard's Breathless."
– Nicolas Rapold, The New York Sun. Click here to read full article

“Over the course of 81 of the briskest minutes in cinema, François Truffaut's Shoot The Piano Player contains flashbacks, jump-cuts, weird superimpositions, tender love scenes, broad slapstick, a snowbound shootout with feckless gangsters, a sing-along in a Parisian piano bar, and countless nods to American noirs and genre films. At once more radical and more playful than any other film in Truffaut's career, and brimming with inspired touches that still seem surprising after a dozen viewings, much less one… A movie-lover's movie, Shoot The Piano Player found a young director drunk on cinema and buying for the bar.”
– Scott Tobias, The Onion

(1960) “Even when he’s with somebody, he walks alone.” Tickling the ivories in a two-bit dive, dead-panned Charlie Kohler is obviously a burnout, although timidly tending toward involvement again with lively barmaid Marie Dubois (Jules and Jim) — but didn’t he used to be Edouard Saroyan, the distinguished concert pianist? (Of course he is, here played in a masterpiece of casting by Piaf protégé and already legendary maître de chanson Aznavour.) But after the tragic demise of his marriage, and the ensuing abandonment of his career, can he come back to life? Thanks to his doing-it-for-free hooker neighbor Michele Mercier, waitress Dubois, and his sudden need to rescue his roughneck brothers from tough guy wannabes so gangsterish it’s as though they knew they were acting in a Warner Bros. programmer, he actually starts to begin again, but then... Both an homage and a parody of the B movie (also referencing Bogart’s The Big Shot for the concluding snow scenes), Truffaut’s adaptation of David Goodis’ pulp classic Down There is packed with searching conversations, never-seen-again strangers, Boby Lapointe’s brawl-calming song, and zany visual gags (an otherwise unseen old lady collapses directly after a tough swears on his mother’s life) in “perhaps the only comedy about melancholia” (Pauline Kael). Photographed by New Wave legend Raoul Coutard (Breathless, Contempt), with music by Georges Delerue (Jules and Jim, The Conformist). “Filled with good and bad jokes, bits from Sacha Guitry films, clowns and thugs, tough kids, songs and fantasy and snow scenes, and homage to the American B gangster pictures of the 40s and 50s. Nihilistic in attitude, yet by its wits and its spirits it’s totally involved in life and fun. Nothing is clear-cut; the ironies crisscross and bounce.” – Pauline Kael. Approx. 81 min.
A Janus Films Release.
1:00, 2:40, 4:20, 6:00, 7:45, 9:30

“Uniquely idiosyncratic. About as unpredictable from one moment to the next as any film I know... Aznavour’s piano player anticipates a whole range of modern movie characters, from Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle to Robert Forster’s aging bail bondsman in Jackie Brown.”
– Kent Jones. Click here to read full article

“Fantastic! One of the key films of the French New Wave. A strange pastiche of gangster movie, love story, and cabaret film, with a totally and calculatedly unpredictable plot. The story is by turns comic and pathetic, often flashing midstream from one mood to the other, and Aznavour's performance as the wounded hero is a masterstroke of casting.”
– Time Out (London)