[3] The film begins with a pan onto the locked gates of the Cinémathèque Française, then based at the Palais de Chaillot.

Antoine Doinel, now a young man, is discharged from the army as unfit, because he prefers to read novels and write to his sweetheart, violinist Christine Darbon, than to obey his superiors.

After learning that Antoine needs a job, Christine's parents help him get hired as a night clerk in the Hôtel Alsina, where he spends most of his time reading.

One morning, a man accompanied by a private detective makes Antoine lead them to a room where a woman has recently checked in.

The company sends Antoine, whose lack of skills makes him try for hours to fix a TV that is only missing a tube.

The website's critical consensus states: "Stolen Kisses is a fine feature follow-up to The 400 Blows, transforming Antoine Doinel into a sympathetic, silly, and romantic figure that carries to the series' end".

[5] In an enthusiastic review for The New York Times (4 March 1969), Vincent Canby commented:[6] With what can only be described as cinematic grace, Truffaut's point of view slips in and out of Antoine so that something that on the surface looks like a conventional movie eventually becomes as fully and carefully populated as a Balzac novel.

Truffaut is the star of the film, always in control, whether the movie is ranging into the area of slapstick, lyrical romance or touching lightly on De Gaulle's France (a student demonstration on the TV screen).

His love of old movies is reflected in plot devices (overheard conversations), incidental action (two children walking out of the shoe store wearing Laurel and Hardy masks), and in the score, which takes Charles Trenet's 1943 song Que reste-t-il de nos amours (known in an English-language version as "I Wish You Love") and turns it into a joyous motif.Danny Peary called it "François Truffaut's witty, sad, insightful meditation on Love, encompassing passion, courtship, confusion, conflict, romance, jealousy, disloyalty, dishonesty, sex, conquest, and commitment (and second thoughts).