"This has to be number one because it’s the film that opened the door to foreign cinema for me. I first saw it at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1967. I was stunned by the playful mix of romance, jazz, gangsters, and Paris. I must have seen it fifteen times since. In 1976, I played the lead in an homage to Breathless, Amos Poe’s Unmade Beds—though my connection to Belmondo sadly ends there."

"I actually went to the theater as an eleven-year-old and saw this film in its original release. (I know. Weird.) The cinematography (Raoul Coutard), the editing (Françoise Bonnot won the Oscar), the score by Mikis Theodorakis, and the performances by Yves Montand, Irene Papas, and Jean-Louis Trintignant created an overall intensity that overwhelmed me. One of the most searing political thrillers ever made, and one of Costa-Gavras’s greatest, it won best foreign language film at the Academy Awards in 1970."

"My first foreign film experience, at the age of eleven, is one of the finest films on the subject of the Holocaust. Without showing any scenes of extreme violence, it fully realizes, through its simple characters, the devastation of what happened and how it can happen if people don’t pay attention or fall prey to delusion. Here is where I also discovered great acting for the first time. Forty years later, Ida Kaminska and Josef Kroner’s performances remain amongst the best I have ever seen on the screen."