"Brief Encounter, I think, is just an exquisite movie. I think I see it at least once a year. It’s a Noel Coward and David Lean movie, and it’s so ahead of its time in so many ways. Visually, it’s ahead of its time. Oh my God, it’s like a piece of music. That sequence of lines in it, when they’re out in the countryside, and he says, “Are you cold, darling?” And she says, “No, not really.” He says, “Are you happy?” And she says, “No, not really.” It’s f—ing heartbreaking. I mean, it pulls every string; it’s beautiful. And it’s also a movie that’s… the first movie I can think of — maybe I’m wrong — where a woman has an affair and is the hero of the piece, and isn’t vilified by the piece. The husband is not evil; you know, the husband is kind of wonderful , and at the end he says, “You’ve been so very far away, and I’m glad you’ve come home,” and all of that. It’s just beautiful."

"Being swept up in British pop culture and its swinging sixties scene is something that I am not close to alone in and yet may be hard-pressed to explain. Well, the British are so beautiful, and you can’t understand a word they’re saying. Screaming girls and Beatle haircuts may provide some distraction, but A Hard Day’s Night captures the mood of a traumatized postwar culture just as effectively as other, starker films of the “new” British cinema. In Billy Liar, Tom Courtenay’s Billy could be a famous Beatle in the making except that comedy writing is his calling, and the more eccentric and imaginative he allows himself to become creatively, the clearer it is how stifled he is by his family, his lack of self, and his generally dismal surroundings. The bleakness and futurelessness are so embedded in this character’s outlook and ultimate outcome that even the sway of Julie Christie’s modern vivaciousness and beautiful smile can’t compete with his inability to rise out of his own sorry lot in life. Just a little bit heartbreaking."

"I’ve said and written so much about this picture over the years; for me it’s always been one of the very greatest ever made, and every time I go back to look at it—about once a year—it’s new: it reveals another side, another level, and it goes deeper. What is it that’s so special about The Red Shoes? Of course, it’s beautiful, one of the most beautiful Technicolor films ever made; it has such an extraordinary sense of magic—look again at the scene where Moira Shearer is walking up the steps to Anton Walbrook’s villa, especially in the new restoration: it seems like she’s floating on currents of sparkling light and air. And there’s no other picture that dramatizes and visualizes the overwhelming obsession of art, the way it can take over your life. But on a deeper level, in the movement and energy of the filmmaking itself, is a deep and abiding love of art, a belief in art as a genuinely transcendent state."