"My fondness for hooks, stalls, and dips made it difficult to choose between the pickpockets of David Lean and those of Robert Bresson. Both great, but Criterion’s transfer of Guy Green’s painterly cinematography put this one over the top. Please sir, I want some more . . ."

"Summertime is David Lean escaping from British filmmaking to take on a love story starring Katherine Hepburn. Perhaps not his finest moment, but my father did the art direction, which is sumptuous, and I spent a whole summer in Venice watching it being made."

"David Lean again, in perhaps the best translation of a Dickens novel to the screen, and surely the greatest of Dickens’s novels too. Crisp, brilliantly cast, a flawless rendition of the period, and amazingly faithful to the novel, Great Expectations is the model that every Masterpiece Theater rendition of an English classic strives to emulate, only better, far better than that."

"Most people remember David Lean for his big-scale epics, like Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, or The Bridge on the River Kwai. But here he is at his most precise and poetic. Both movies are epics of the spirit, and both are plagued by grand, utterly magical moments and settings; whether showing Oliver’s mother straining and in pain, by intercutting with a flexing branch of thorns, or by lovingly lingering on Miss Havisham’s decaying splendor, Lean understand the need for hyperbole in order to manage the larger-than-life Dickensian archetypes. Some of the passages in both films skate the fine line between poetry and horror."

"Most people remember David Lean for his big-scale epics, like Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, or The Bridge on the River Kwai. But here he is at his most precise and poetic. Both movies are epics of the spirit, and both are plagued by grand, utterly magical moments and settings; whether showing Oliver’s mother straining and in pain, by intercutting with a flexing branch of thorns, or by lovingly lingering on Miss Havisham’s decaying splendor, Lean understand the need for hyperbole in order to manage the larger-than-life Dickensian archetypes. Some of the passages in both films skate the fine line between poetry and horror."

"I love Hopscotch and dream of making a movie like it. It’s just full of fun and double crosses. Ronald Neame is very unsung as a director, but he made the coolest movies. He worked a lot with David Lean, so I think it’s interesting to look at Lean, who did these giant epics, and Neame, who was way more experimental and wild in choosing the kinds of movies he was going to make. Hopscotch is basically a perfect film, and Walter Matthau is unreal in it. You watch him and you think, that’s what American actors should have been and should always be. Hopscotch has that heist-noir and cat-and-mouse thing going on, but it’s also bright and goofy and funny and hits a tone that’s so unique and clear."