"I recently was taken to an old cinema in Atlanta to watch this. I hadn’t seen it before, and it resonated with me for weeks: it’s quite preposterous and absurd, but it’s a real picture of alienation juxtaposed with love and growth, and this exploration of losing your visibility even when you’re the focal point. There’s something so stark and brutal about the film. And also to watch it after Bowie’s death, it resonates a bit more, because it feels like there’s a little bit of his soul captured in the movie."

"We see this same edge space in this film, especially in the sequence at the end . . . new buildings facing barren open space and roads leading nowhere. I saw this at the Cinémathèque française recently. I was a little late for the screening, so I had to sit in the front row, in front of the sixty-foot screen, in the main cinema. An intense experience to be totally dominated by the images of this film. The last shot of Monica Vitti, where she stares into the camera, actually pinned me to my seat!"

"No filmmaker gets under my skin more consistently than Fritz Lang, and while M lacks some of the paranoid extravagance of his silent fantasies, it is flawless. Peter Lorre ingeniously incarnates the evolution from lizard to man, and the director’s every shot and sound underscores the excitement of cinema in the process of discovering its own power. One of the disc’s extras finds Claude Chabrol unsuccessfully attempting to mimic a Lang camera move. The new Criterion print, with a corrected aspect ratio and restored fade-out line, burnishes the film’s deathless vitality."

"This beautiful high-def transfer has made me see the movie with fresh eyes. I’m now convinced that Ingrid Bergman’s performance is arguably the greatest female performance in the history of cinema. Cary Grant’s no slouch either. It’s my favorite Hitchcock. Leaving the highball glass on the chest (breast) of the passed-out party guest is on a par with putting the cigarette out in the jar of face cream in Rebecca. I must say, though, that the new transfer of The Lady Vanishes is pretty amazing as well."

"Then, Cinema Paradiso, because it’s about a director and his dreams. Very close to my heart. It deals with just a kid who kind of falls in love with somebody in film, and film is also the relationship with a projectionist. Another one of my favorites is La nuit americaine by Truffaut. I kind of enjoy movies about movies. I’d never really wanted to become a director. I wanted to become a production designer. You know, certain movies had better production design than others, and that was driving me for the longest time."