“Coming after Beware of a Holy Whore, Day for Night is the Gish sisters compared to Divine and Vampira. Truffaut's picture does not deny the pandemonium of movie-making, but it treats it as an exhilarating torrent of achievement and delight, like the montage ‘cinema reigns.' For Truffaut, the frustrations and the deceit in the picture business are a necessary ordeal, white lies on the way to the truth. The lyricism is no more romantic than Fassbinder's pessimism, and here is a picture we see being made with all the problems of a coy kitten and a forgetful star, not to mention the pressure among the cast to make a melodrama of their own that may stop the shooting. Truffaut's own participation, playing the director, is tense, harassed and deaf, but the dreams of his childhood, trying to penetrate the locked gates of Citizen Kane, make one of the most heartfelt confessions in movies.
“Truffaut's on-screen command of many people and their stories is so quick and deft that the skill could go unappreciated. If the film seems sentimental finally, or self-intoxicated, still the sense of comradeship is not unworthy of Renoir and it is what binds together the mixed group of veterans and newcomers-- Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortesa, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Dani, Alexandra Stewart, Jean Champion, Nike Arrighi, Natalie Baye, David Markham, as well as a great novelist--resident of Nice, not unacquainted in movies but not owning up to his name.” David Thomson