"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."

"All the films on the list represent certain turning points in my relation with film history and they have all taught me about cinema’s strangeness and its chameleon-like nature. I have to end with these two films that I have returned to recently as a writer and that I know by heart, both in sound and image. I value both Rossellini and Ophuls very particularly as characters and also for their very different styles of direction: Ophuls a perfectionist, Rossellini almost casual. But these two films are, furthermore, literally marked by their stars’ extraordinary (although again stylistically very different) performances. Finally, the films take me back to the 1950s—where I began the list, and thus my life as a film fan—and to which I seem to return over and over again."

"Is there a greater, more suggestive and bittersweet movie title than All That Heaven Allows? (Well, yes, there is, Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . , but that’s another story and another great Criterion disc.) Sirk dug beneath the surface of idyllic American small-town life in the 1950s, and the surface has never been more beautiful than in this Technicolor nightmare of conformity and the repressive nature of community and family life. It’s Freud vs. Walden, as pettiness, jealousy, and repression pair off against a bohemian vision of rural tranquility. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose brilliant essay on Sirk is included as an extra, remade the movie as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and it was also the model for Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven and Sanaa Hamri’s not-too-shabby Something New."