"Speaking of Un chien andalou, Buñuel has one of the most perfect careers in cinema, and was able to harness lunacy and despair with wit and economy. There are many Buñuel titles in the Criterion Collection, but I chose Belle de jour because it remains so beguiling. I was offered the chance to remake it about twenty years ago, but it seemed like such a futile exercise. Has anyone been more perfectly cast than Deneuve in this film?"

"I came to Larisa Shepitko through reading about Elem Klimov after watching Come and See. When I saw that Criterion had put out two of her films through their Eclipse label, I snapped them up. These discs are probably my most prized in my collection. Watching The Ascent feels like being punched in the nose and rolled in the snow. I felt like I’d time traveled to the Second World War and was there as a silent witness."

"I came to Larisa Shepitko through reading about Elem Klimov after watching Come and See. When I saw that Criterion had put out two of her films through their Eclipse label, I snapped them up. These discs are probably my most prized in my collection. Watching The Ascent feels like being punched in the nose and rolled in the snow. I felt like I’d time traveled to the Second World War and was there as a silent witness."

"The masterpiece. I keep an American Cinematheque membership; they do an amazing job of regularly screening classics (including many from the Criterion Collection) at two great theaters in LA. Bronwyn and I had the privilege of attending their screening of Seven Samurai at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica last year. Seeing this on the big screen, among the more talked-about aspects of this film, the unexpected humor really shines. It was the shortest, most engaging three and a half hours I’ve ever spent in a theater."

"Well, England is to my taste a great, great film country. I don’t think any filmmakers have been greater than Hitchcock, fabulously represented in the Criterion Collection by The Lady Vanishes and a great box set, Wrong Men & Notorious Women; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, represented by many films, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (one of their very best, also made during World War II); and of course Mike Leigh. Topsy-Turvy is so fascinating, because Mike Leigh celebrates precisely the approach to acting that he has driven his own actors farther and farther away from in his own films."

"One of the very few westerns, my favorite classical genre, in the Criterion Collection. How to make an almost huis clos in the immensity of Monument Valley? Only Ford had that secret. The apparition of the great John Wayne in the Ford family, as the Ringo Kid, in a beautiful tracking shot, made him a star. Later, Wayne said about Ford: “This made me a star, and I’ll be grateful to him forever. But I don’t think he ever really had any kind of respect for me as an actor until I made Red River for Howard Hawks, ten years later. Even then, I was never quite sure.”"

"This is just one of those movies that leaves you feeling queasy all over. Eating Raoul plays on all the stereotypical shock/schlock clichés typical of so-called B culture, which at the time (the early 1980s) was also being probed by Paul Bartel’s fellow Angelenos Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw (and perhaps further up the coast by the Kuchar brothers), who were also fascinated with and inspired by the prudish 1950s. Is there a moral here? Does there need to be? Why, exactly, is this film in the Criterion Collection? All questions better to put out of your mind when you pop it in."

"Wait—before we begin . . . Obviously, we can mention ten films from the Criterion Collection that have been deeply meaningful to us in one way or another, but once we have a list of films that we’ve loved or been affected by, do you actually feel capable of saying which films on the list you prefer or think are better? Because I don’t. I think we should just mention ten films, but we should announce at the beginning that the order of the ten is arbitrary. And as a matter of fact, the list of the ten itself—well, it isn’t arbitrary, but speaking for myself, on a different day I could easily have mentioned other films . . ."