"I am a huge Nicolas Roeg fan and consider this and his 1973 masterpiece Don’t Look Now to feature some of the best editing of all time, with visual and audio juxtapositions that wow even now. Walkabout is cinema as poetry. Images rhyme with one another in a truly hypnotic fashion. Scenes are as vivid and intense as they are unreal and lyrical. There’s a phantasmagorical array of images, but also a rigorous, genius sense of structure. Both this film and Don’t Look Now open with sequences that encapsulate the movie like thematic overtures. Walkabout’s first five minutes tell you everything while saying nothing: images of the city overlaid with aboriginal music, breathing exercises at a girls’ school that complement the native sounds, an oasis of parkland in the urban sprawl, a lone tree in a concrete square, a patch of swimming-pool blue in an apartment block contrasted with the white-hot nothingness of the outback. It’s a completely stunning collage, one of the greatest openings in all of cinema. And what’s even better? The rest of the movie lives up to it."

"Five Easy Pieces is inventive, very funny, very fresh, and just a joy to watch. Probably one of the funniest moments in cinema I’ve ever seen happens when they’re driving with the two girls they’ve picked up, and one of the girls just keeps saying negative things about trash and filth. I love that Bob Rafelson had such freedom that he didn’t mind going deeper and deeper and repeating a joke. You feel that he doesn’t need to go fast just because there’s a producer telling him the joke has been understood and we need to move on. The moments are meaningful in themselves, and if you’re enjoying them, why not carry on? This is what Rafelson does, and I find it incredibly funny. But at the same time, it’s also deep. I would say that the last sequence at the gas station is probably one of the best endings in the history of cinema. This is the film every beatnik would have loved to make. It perfectly expresses this feeling about living intensely but without a sense of purpose, not knowing where you’re going."

"I saw this at Helsinki’s Love and Anarchy Film Festival, only missed the beginning of the film, and had to leave early to present my own film at another cinema. This was just a great debut. Really stripped down and honest without the frills and trappings that often come with first film insecurity. I was completely immersed in the couple’s predicament and to my shameful ignorance, there was so much I didn’t know about IVF prior to seeing the film. I’d only seen Josh O’Connor in “God’s Own Country,” but he was just as believable and brilliant in “Only You,” and Laia Costa completely pulled me into the depths of her frustrations. It was also great to see not only a European character in a British film, but also a European played by a European rather than a Brit putting on an accent, which is still often the case. I wonder how that will pan out after Brexit. I had to leave the cinema when the protagonists had a row towards its final minutes and still don’t know or want to know how it ended until I watch it again."