"My grandfather brought me to see this movie on a Saturday afternoon in a theater in the suburbs of Paris. I was 11 and it was PG-13. I was petrified when the film started, feeling as though I was in a forbidden place. Since the heroine was a little girl my age, I totally identified with her and felt that I was also possessed by the devil."

"Another emotional bludgeoning from De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, this one belonging—along with The Last Laugh—to that small genre concerning aged men playing out their hopeless, last, lonely days. It must have been something, back in 1952, when this film went head-to-head with Forbidden Games for the honor of most tearful ending! Right from the shank of titan De Sica’s neorealist years! I love being destroyed by masters!"

"I first saw this on a ghostly, fifth-generation Betamax bootleg bought from a record fair in Glasgow in the early 1980s (the same way I first watched Eat the Document, A Clockwork Orange, and the films of the Sex Pistols’s U.S. tour). As much as the bleached-out, mysteriously forbidden images on my copy of this film had a degraded beauty all their own, seeing and hearing the film now in its full glory is a thing of joy."

"“It all started on an ordinary day, in the most ordinary place in the world.”—Brief Encounter David Lean’s depictions of two ordinary women (Celia Johnson’s Laura and Katharine Hepburn’s Jane) restraining their desires for Trevor Howard and Rosanno Brazzi, respectively, are two of my all-time favorite cinematic portrayals of forbidden heterosexual love. Incidentally, both use the writing of gay playwrights as source material: Brief Encounter is based on Noël Coward’s Still Life, and Summertime adapts Arthur Laurents’s The Time of the Cuckoo."

"It all started on an ordinary day, in the most ordinary place in the world.”—Brief Encounter David Lean’s depictions of two ordinary women (Celia Johnson’s Laura and Katharine Hepburn’s Jane) restraining their desires for Trevor Howard and Rosanno Brazzi, respectively, are two of my all-time favorite cinematic portrayals of forbidden heterosexual love. Incidentally, both use the writing of gay playwrights as source material: Brief Encounter is based on Noël Coward’s Still Life, and Summertime adapts Arthur Laurents’s The Time of the Cuckoo."