"Light and sky. Rain and wind. Sea and smoke. These are the fearsome natural elements that Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” explores, creating a modern cinema that manages to look both backward and forward. Backward, to an almost square format and to the visual sorcery of Bergman and Dreyer, of Herzog and Lang. But forward as well, to Eggers’ own imagining of a peculiarly American past, and toward his own brutal conception of masculinity in a death match with itself… "

"This has to be number one because it’s the film that opened the door to foreign cinema for me. I first saw it at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1967. I was stunned by the playful mix of romance, jazz, gangsters, and Paris. I must have seen it fifteen times since. In 1976, I played the lead in an homage to Breathless, Amos Poe’s Unmade Beds—though my connection to Belmondo sadly ends there."

"Again, another adult fairytale, and like Eyes Without a Face, a one-off. It is a loss to cinema that Charles Laughton never got another chance to direct a film. The Night of the Hunter shows such a willingness to do things in his own highly stylized and theatrical manner, I can’t imagine where he could have gone from there. Still, if you’re going to make one film, it might as well be as unforgettable as this."

"A sense of shredded nerves pervades the whole film, soothed by some of the most beautiful colors ever seen on a cinema screen (the rhyming green of Monica Vitti’s coat chief among them). Remember that weird almost-orgy down by the docks, in some kind of hut? It’s one of those scenes—and one of those films—you watch again and again to see if it’s really as you remember it. Of course it is—and isn’t."

"Powell and Pressburger’s ballet-oriented film of Offenbach’s opera of Hoffmann’s tales . . . as rich and strange a confection as the cinema ever produced, with astonishing work from Moira Shearer as the dancing automaton Olympia (whose absurd demise,with broken springs coiling out of her severed head, I always find shocking and sad) and Robert Helpmann as Hoffmann’s multifaced archenemy. With effects technique that could have been used by Méliès and gorgeous color art direction, costuming, and cinematography."