"One of the greatest films ever made by a director who, almost forty years after his death, is still an intimidating and disturbing figure in the history of cinema. Visconti’s films stand outside the borders of the medium, by their ambition, by their scope, uniting past and present, individuals and history, both deeply human and transcendent. The Leopard, his most translucent, towering achievement, embodies everything the best filmmaking can be, grand, profound, entertaining, physical and metaphysical, sharp as a blade and melodramatic. It stays with you, forever."

"To start with, a unique film from Scorsese’s career, rediscovered recently, and a feminist melodrama with constant emotion. The humanity that transpires within the slightest exchange, the slightest look between actors (a beautiful group led by Ellen Burstyn) can almost be seen as vestiges from another time – contemporary cinema having lost (momentarily?) this sort of innate grace, the pleasure of acting, of crying and living in front of a camera. Today’s “naturalism” seems quite faded when one sees a film of this moral fiber."

"This movies brings me back to my first years discovering cinema. In the South of France, where I grew up, the first video-clubs were in newsagents. One could mostly find horror and porn movies. This is how I discovered Carpenter, Argento, Cronenberg. In Assault on Precinct 13 and in a lot of other Carpenter films a man is trying to reconstruct society. At the time, horror films were rooted in real emotions and actual fears, like Dario Argento’s fear of the Red Brigades."

"Not my favorite Cronenberg film, but one that works, for obvious reasons, extremely well on home video. This was a pivotal movie for me, the film that bridged my adolescent love of horror and fantasy to a cinema of ideas. Just when, umpteen viewings on, I thought I couldn’t possibly get anything new out of it, Criterion drops the full cut of Samurai Dreams, the exquisite soft core J-porn excerpted in the feature, as an extra. The Criterion Collection, putting the bone in bonus since 1984."

"For me, this created a whole new layer of filmmaking. It’s an amazing movie, and a little bit like La strada in that you don’t have to be a filmmaker or enthusiast to appreciate it. It just plays out like a really good documentary and a really good fiction, and it says a lot not only about Iranian society but about the human condition. This is the richest movie Kiarostami made, in my opinion, and it’s one of the best works of Iranian cinema."

"Bo Widerberg is – like, to a certain extent, Jan Troell – one of the great modern filmmakers who has been least recognized. In a way, he was a Swedish Pialat – another great filmmaker whose international recognition remains problematic – his cinema intensely sensitive, inscribing itself in an osmosis with nature observed with an eye like that of the impressionists. The dry lyricism in this work is also that of revolutionary hopes at a labor movement’s inception, a lyricism also found in another of his films, Joe Hill."