"I loved listening to comedy albums when I was growing up. This one was produced by George Martin. Sellers used to put on all these accents and do them perfectly. On 'Suddenly It's Folk Song' it's him playing a German anthropologist. [Proceeds to recount entire section of the album verbatim, accents and all] It's just a great record. I loved all those black and white caper movies. The talent on Sellers was just amazing. He was so influential on the Bonzos and the Python people. I picked up on this as a teenager and I know every word of it now. It's perfect. It's extraordinary how funny he is."

"An incredibly bold portrait of Ian Curtis’s life, which manages to take his story away from mythology really convincingly. You’re shown a young man trying to balance life in music and his illness with a domestic existence, and the performances of Sam Riley as Curtis and Samantha Morton as his wife, Deborah, are very powerful. I wasn’t a huge Joy Division fan when they were around – I was studying nearby in Liverpool – but this film absolutely captures the mood of that time, as does the black-and-white cinematography. It also nails that struggle of being an artist and a human being. That isn’t captured enough."

"This fifth film from von Sternberg and Dietrich is their apotheosis, delirious and excessive, with the most perfectly controlled photography (by Bert Glennon) of any black-and-white film ever made. Dietrich never looked more beautiful, nor flaunted her signature decadent Dietrich persona more fully. Their sixth and final film, The Devil Is a Woman, harshly photographed by von Sternberg himself, just didn’t work. But after The Scarlet Empress, it’s not surprising that neither director nor actor had anywhere better to go, as this film summed up and concluded the greatest actor-director collaboration in film history. And the supporting performances by Louise Dresser, as the empress, and Sam Jaffe, as the mad emperor, are really superb."