"This is the definitive portrait of conflicted youth struggling toward self-identity. The final tracking shot of Antoine Doinel—running down the beach to the water’s edge, stopping, with no further escape route in front of him, then turning toward camera and freeze-framed with an optical zoom into his young and lost face—always brings me to tears. It is one of the most moving and deeply earned endings to a film ever made. It was Truffaut at the brink of his career, not yet the “Truffaut” to come, still the haughty Cahiers critic who thought that just maybe he could do it better than the films of the French “Tradition of Quality.” And he and his fellow Cahiers writers did do it better. Truffaut and Malle were the two humanist poles of the New Wave, with Truffaut most closely mirroring the mix of emotions that resided in the work of his mentor, Jean Renoir, whose own film"

"So, Raging Bull. We got a young De Niro, who put the weight on and took it off. “I got no choice!” I mean again, its something very specific to a culture and neighborhood. A young Pesci, Scorsese, all the acting in it, I just connected with it. I laughed and I got uncomfortable at the same time. I felt every emotion every time I watch that film. That’s a great night at the cinema for me when I’ve laughed, when I’ve cried, when I was angry, and when I was turned on. All of those emotions are happening when I watch that film. It’s like putting my favorite audio book on. Sometimes I can just close my eyes and listen to them talk, and there’s such a rhythm. It just feels so authentic and this is just regular conversation. It was almost like they didn’t even have a script. I think that’s a testament to the acting and the writing."