"This film contains some of my favorite quiet moments in all of cinema, and Kieślowski is a master of using restraint as a means to tell a powerful story. Small moments in a Kieślowski film can often carry the weight and impact of a sledgehammer. Just watch the beginning of Blue and you will see what I mean. And while you’re at it, I recommend checking out the rest of the great Three Colors trilogy."

"Mulholland Dr. and Blue Velvet were the two films that had the most impact on me during my college years. This was the first time I realized how cinema can depict our dreams and nightmares. This film represents our deepest fears of celebrity, fame, and identity—and how ambition, greed, and jealousy can make our realities a nightmare. I see it as a cautionary tale of Hollywood, blurring the lines between reality and dreams. "

"You can go into the depth and go inside into his mind, and it’s like miles and miles of depth. Which you can’t really get in the actor’s realm, but Charlie Chaplin could get. And his speech in The Great Dictator, the way he spoke when he played Hitler in The Great Dictator. It is one of the greatest monologues to come out of cinema. Nobody has ever been able to achieve that."

"I made a short film for the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival (Artaud Double Bill), which is a meditation on the scene where Anna Karina goes into a cinema to watch Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and sees Antonin Artaud on-screen. Something about this sequence seemed to define the essence of cinephilia. Perhaps it’s just the thought of seeing actors watch another film within a film I’m watching."

"Typically, I saw La Jetée, my first Chris Marker, in film school. To this day, I’ll hold that no other film is as great a contemplation of cinema in a way—and this is the important part—that is immediately accessible to anyone and everyone, not just students of semiotics or, for that matter, kids in film school. Sans Soleil is, of course, another matter altogether, which is what makes their Criterion pairing so auspicious."

"Not a horror movie but a valentine to the imagination that hinges on one little girl’s need for an imaginary friend, who turns out to be Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, stepped off the screen in rural Spain when a traveling cinema brings James Whale’s movie to town in the 1930s. Victor Erice’s study of childhood wishes showcases the huge eyes of Ana Torrent and grapples fascinatingly with the importance of fantasy in eras of repression."

"I am such a blokey bloke and that movie… We’re down at the holiday house, and I’ve taken all my DVDs down to our holiday house, and I’ll just chuck that on, because I know I’m going to laugh at that constantly. I think these three movies so far give you an insight to how crazy or kooky I am. I watched Superbad in a cinema, and I watched it three times."

"A dark and unknown masterpiece of animated cinema: the adventures of a little girl taken in by circus freaks who make her suffer the worst atrocities – until our young heroine falls madly in love with the dwarf of the troupe. Its inventiveness is both incredibly visual and poetic, and Midori imprints its barbaric and desperate mark on your soul for a long time after seeing it. The nightmarish counterpart to Miyazaki’s films."