"It’s difficult to watch The Great Dictator without thinking about how the world was about to be plunged into five years of war and horror, and it saturates everything with more wistful sadness than Chaplin probably could have imagined. It’s a comedy at the end of the world . . . this brief and desperate beam of optimism, laughing in the face of evil, just before everything went dark. These two Chaplin releases, as well as The Gold Rush and City Lights, are among the most amazing-looking Blu-rays I’ve seen. Could Criterion please do the same restoration work for Buster Keaton next?"

"One of the reasons I did Crimes of Passion was because I saw The Music Lovers, Ken Russell’s film, with Richard Chamberlain. It was, and I still think it is, one of the most extraordinary films I have ever seen. Amazing. So when Ken came to talk to me about [Crimes], you know, I was thrilled. I got a wonderful note once from Isabella Rossellini and she told me that she did Blue Velvet because she saw Crimes of Passion. I thought that was a really nice compliment, because I think she’s quite wonderful. So that’s a movie."

"It’s one of the most influential records ever, on me. I’ve talked about it many times. I always feel duty bound to ram it home, what an amazing achievement to get so much Marxist anger into an album, which is actually really delicately played. People always accuse them of being Smiths copyists but it’s much faster, stuff like ‘Antinature’ and ‘The Well Of Loneliness,’ ‘An MP Speaks’, it’s a seamless album that can grind you into submission, like all good communists should. Brilliant cover as well. Of all my records this is definitely my most played piece of vinyl."

"For me, 'Soul Love' is an amazing love song without being too sugary. It isn't boy-meets-girl, jealousy, betrayal, sort of thing - it wasn't normal. It was a spiritual kind of love song, so I have a lot of respect for how he kept it in that kind of a concept. I didn't really know what it was about, but the concept is about a love of a person and a love of the spiritual side of man, which is my personal take on it. Might not be what he meant, but that's how I have always felt about it."

"This movie and Criterion’s other Edward Yang release, Yi Yi, really show what a master he was at creating incredibly personal and nuanced character studies that are both sprawling and multifaceted. A Brighter Summer Day is so immensely heartbreaking to me for how it depicts Si’r, an awkward, withdrawn kid who is under siege from all sides—at school, at home, with his friends and rival gangs, and with his first crush—battling his way through it all as best he can but spiraling inexorably toward tragedy. Also, the restoration of this film is seriously amazing—so thankful for this release."

"The amazing thing about W. C. Fields’s comedy is how much mileage he can get out of almost no plot and very little dialogue. The humor comes from his gleeful disdain of American propriety, and from his impeccable sense of timing and absurdity. He can build a comic routine out of the pronunciation of “proboscis” and of such names as “Egbert Souse.” Fields’s movies have few frills, and the same is true of this straightforward single-disc version, but the performance and the movie are as bracing as a shot or two of late-morning whiskey."

"In the mid-seventies I got more into the art of cinema (and into the arts in general), which coincided with a great period in American cinema. I got seriously hooked on Taxi Driver, Badlands, Days of Heaven. These films with alienated heroes, where landscape becomes soul-scape. They made me realize that cinema can be this amazing space where images, words, faces, landscapes, and music all melt together in a mysterious way. Even now, my favorite films are those that take you out of yourself, that make you enter this other world on-screen. These three films did exactly that to me."

"In the mid-seventies I got more into the art of cinema (and into the arts in general), which coincided with a great period in American cinema. I got seriously hooked on Taxi Driver, Badlands, Days of Heaven. These films with alienated heroes, where landscape becomes soul-scape. They made me realize that cinema can be this amazing space where images, words, faces, landscapes, and music all melt together in a mysterious way. Even now, my favorite films are those that take you out of yourself, that make you enter this other world on-screen. These three films did exactly that to me."

"I don’t know what it was about that movie that was just incredible. It was something about the storytelling, the characters, and the pace of the movie, the atmosphere of it and the tragic ending that absolutely blew my mind. It made me realise movies could tell stories in a different way. That was the day – when I was 11 years old – when I decided to get involved in movies. It was when I said to myself, “I want to be a director.” It was so powerful to me. It’s really worth seeing; it’s an amazing bleak, beautiful, tragic movie"