"If cinema went looking for a Theory of Everything—and found it—it would probably look something like this. All I can add, really, is that I very, very much hope to see A Brighter Summer Day in the not too distant future"

"How can a film composed almost entirely of still frames and of such a brief length be such a revered and influential summation on the very nature of cinematic time? There is nothing else like it in all of cinema. It is perfect"

"In My Voyage to Italy, the documentary that we made about Italian cinema, we started with this picture. For me, it really was the beginning. I saw it for the first time on television with my grandparents, and their overwhelming reaction to what had happened to their homeland since they left at the turn of the century was just as present and vivid for me as the images and the characters. I was experiencing the power of cinema itself, in this case made far beyond Hollywood, under extremely tough conditions and with inferior equipment. And I was also seeing that cinema wasn’t just about the movie itself but the relationship between the movie and its audience. Fellini said that when Rossellini was filming the Po Valley sequence, he acted on pure instinct, inventing freely as he went along. The result—in that episode, and in the Sicilian and Neapolitan and Florentine episodes as well—is still startling: it’s like seeing reality itself unfolding before your eyes."

"A great beach read. Or better yet, a great book to have read to you while performing some inane and tedious task. It’s delicious Hollywood gossip starting from the first days of cinema through the ‘70s. And you better believe every word of it."

"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."

"I saw this in the late eighties in the cinema, and it was probably the first art-house film I ever saw. I can’t really remember much about it now and really should see it again, but I do remember crying for about a week."