"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."