"Drama John Cassavetes style—aggressive and docu-cool. Handheld and shot in black and white (by Haskell Wexler), it had a great impact on the audience, and on me and my windup Bolex as I tried to figure out how to shoot a scene. Great storytelling."

"This contains some of the most luminescent black-and-white cinematography ever seen. Fagin, as portrayed by Alec Guinness, will have you squirming with repulsion, yet unable to take your eyes off his balding pate."

"David Lean is always known for his big productions. Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai . . . But I’m particularly fond of some of his smaller, black-and-white films. And Oliver Twist is an extraordinary piece of work."

"One of my favorite films by Milos Forman and so bittersweet as to leave an aftertaste. Glorious in black and white and poignant as hell, it’s one of those films that reminds you why you fell in love with cinema in the first place."

"The notion of making a fiction — meaning you look at it and you think it’s all documentary footage, but it’s all shot. And the reality factor of that is something that makes you able to escape into the film; the fabric of that fiction is so believable and completely knitted together that you buy the proposition of the film — even when you see people getting shot and there’s no blood coming out of their bodies or whatever. There’s something about shooting something [in black and white] — and I’m talking about two movies that are in black and white, we should say, except for the part [in Andrei Rublev] where they show the color of the fresco of the Russian icons. I really like movies that are in black and white, because you feel like you are watching a movie. We associate it with things that were filmed at that time, that would have been filmed in black and white. So there are different concessions and commitments to make to a limited palette for a reason. When I make a movie like Miral, there’s a kind of reversal stock that I’m using outside and sometimes it really feels like Technicolor, like a movie like Exodus, and there are other moments when it’s rougher and it feels like The Bad Lieutenant, or something like that."

"Polanski was so inventive in this film. The black and white, the music mixed with the images of her walking through London. The rabbit. Hands coming through the walls. Polanski is a master of tension in unexpected details. Like when she's giving the manicure and cuts the woman’s cuticles . . . I'm pretty sure Aronofsky was huffing these fumes with Black Swan."

"Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, it’s a taut and very telling film about the French/Algerian war of independence, concentrating on the battle of the Kasbah in the capital city of Algiers. A brilliant, prescient, and very humane film with very few “professional” actors. In black and white."