"What’s the most chilling last line in the cinema? How about “cranial drill”? Followed by an unforgettable sound effect. John Frankenheimer’s nightmarish adaptation of David Ely’s be-careful-what-you-wish-for novel has a weary, middle-aged businessman (John Randolph) buy out of his old life and be transformed into Rock Hudson, only to find that renewed youth isn’t satisfying. A unique, affecting, paranoid science-fiction film noir, with a perfectly cast Hudson doing his best-ever screen acting and the too-seldom-used Salome Jens an extraordinary presence as the girl on the beach."

"From the opening shots of Daniel Day Lewis running through a forest in chase of a deer, to the finale when he’s sprinting across a mountain to protect his brother, this is my kind of romance – men and women living upon the earth, fighting for love, and willing to die for nothing more than honor. It may not be the ‘greatest love story’ ever told, but when Day Lewis promises to find Madeleine Stowe’s character, no matter where she goes, before jumping off a waterfall, that’s one of the great scenes in cinema history. Kudos to Michael Mann."

"This is definitely on my list of the greatest movies ever. I saw it in the theater and it was the first time I actually experienced hypnosis in cinema—a conscious hypnosis. It’s one of the mysteries of filmmaking for me—why does it work, and how does it work?—but to be honest I don’t want to look into it because I want it to stay a mystery. If I were running the Library of Congress I would make a 70 mm copy of this and put it in a nuclear shelter, just in case."

"This is a very important film for me, and it makes me want to make more films about Algeria, which is where my father comes from. He actually is an extra in the film, so I’ve always watched it looking for him. I saw it in Brazil at the end of the military dictatorship, when I was about nineteen, and it was an example of political cinema that was important for me at a time when I was developing a sense of political consciousness. Besides it being a great history lesson, it’s a sweeping film that’s just fantastically well made."

"I know this is out of print, but I still have the Criterion disc on my shelf, and it’s one of my favorite DVDs ever. U.S. cinema has made the action film a national product, but all in all I keep thinking of two films that have rewritten filmed and staged action: George Miller’s Mad Max 2, from Australia, and Woo’s Hard Boiled, from Hong Kong. They look familiar as recognizable genre exercises (chases, shootouts), but the truth is they are pretty dangerous and extreme. If you can ever release a Blu-ray for this, I’ll get it."

"I purchased this around the time that I decided I needed to own as many Criterion titles as possible. Also may hold my personal record for shortest time between first seeing a film and spending thirty dollars to own it. I just loved this film and was always rewatching it. Jarmusch was fairly major for me in my early discovery of truly lo-fi independent cinema, and I often found myself returning to his earlier films to study just how simple a film can be and still seem wildly innovative and truly, idiosyncratically the director’s own."

"All of Pasolini’s films are very surprising and impressive because they come from somebody with a deep culture who, through cinema, managed to remove himself from that culture. It’s as if he took culture off and, naked, went and walked off into the world. In this film he really succeeded in adhering to the deepest meaning of the text, of the epic narration and storytelling, without adding any element of pathos, psychological feelings, or sentimentalism—which would have been a very easy pitfall. He just tells the story the way it is without adding to it."