"Buñuel is my first deep love in cinema. He is the adult that pulled the plug on the human art of pretending. He blazes through the hypocrisy at the heart of our bourgeois lives mercilessly—no one is sacred, no ideal or moral is spared. He is perfectly modern, bold, and clear. I found myself laughing in joy and amazement. He understands human nature while refusing to sentimentalize it."

"Agnès Varda is my cinema hero. Vagabond presented a new way of thinking about film form for me. Varda took a very bold approach to the way that she told this story, mixing forms and styles to create a fuller picture of a human being who is invisible to the world, a stranger to everyone, even to herself—begging the ultimate question of how well we ever really know someone."

"The Maysles are masters. Their philosophy of Direct Cinema is proved in these films. Life is as interesting as fiction. This is not reality TV; it is observational documentation in the purest sense. It is not manipulated; the only filter is the obvious love the filmmakers have for their subjects. Salesman is as deep as Death of a Salesman or The Iceman Cometh, and Gimme Shelter is like Greek tragedy."

"The Maysles are masters. Their philosophy of Direct Cinema is proved in these films. Life is as interesting as fiction. This is not reality TV; it is observational documentation in the purest sense. It is not manipulated; the only filter is the obvious love the filmmakers have for their subjects. Salesman is as deep as Death of a Salesman or The Iceman Cometh, and Gimme Shelter is like Greek tragedy."

"Brando and Kazan. If there is some pearly gates studio, many of the films being shown at the Angelic Cinematheques will have these heavyweights working together. Urban poetry, raw and unrestrained masculinity, a heightened method of “real” acting. The kind of picture that really pulls you in, forces all the senses to work in tandem. Hypnotic and earthy, the real stuff of cinema, electrolysis of the rough and the holy."

"When, in the 1970s, I began to search for films made by women that would reflect feminist engagement with cinema at the time, Jeanne Dielman appeared as the perfect answer to a feminist cinephile’s dream. Akerman conjured up a world and a rhythm of life that had never appeared on the screen before, and did so with an extraordinary and radical beauty, political intelligence and mastery of both storytelling and filmmaking."

". . . Speaking of the human soul! This is a film of profound beauty made by a master of cinema, who could go from action-packed samurai epics to this tear-jerking gut-wrencher. This, The Apu Trilogy, and pretty much all of Ozu’s output (man, ten is just too small an amount to list here!) are micro-stories that focus on giant human themes, and I’m so glad they exist!"

"A dice roll—it could have been L’avventura or La notte, but I rewatched this recently and was blown away by Antonioni’s mastery and control, and his epic nihilistic vision of upper-middle-class despair is sweeping and unrivaled. Alain Delon and Monica Vitti are the most gorgeous couple in ’60s international cinema—embalmed and yet completely alive. The trilogy is one of the great achievements in twentieth-century film."

"Scandinavian cinema has, I admit, obsessed me for most of my career as a critic. But all credit to Criterion for giving this bizarre and seductive silent film from 1922 the same loving attention as they would a new release by Richard Linklater or Mike Leigh. For extra value, the DVD includes an abridged version of the movie issued in 1968, with a sly offscreen narration by William S. Burroughs."