"Weirdly, I think Dylan's protest mode never quite 100% rings true to me. It rings 98.5% true, but somewhere, in the back of my mind, there's something inauthentic about it, in some way. And I think he may have felt that. I mean, what's Dylan's best song ever? Probably 'Like A Rolling Stone' and that's just sneering at somebody, a woman he'd been in a relationship with. As a body of work, Blood On The Tracks is faultless, there's not a bum note in there, not a bum word, everything transports you. You know, it's brilliant storytelling, and he's not trying to be too clever. With Blonde On Blonde, which is an album I love, he's trying to make himself come across like a brainiac, talking about Verlaine and French poets, which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that at all, but maybe you feel… I guess he always does that. I suppose Blonde On Blonde is slightly more obscure, slightly more difficult, whereas Blood On The Tracks, he's just storytelling, he just wants to talk about this break-up. I remember being with a girlfriend and her friend, and she said, ""here's the new Dylan thing"" - it draws you in, it immerses you in it and as soon as I started hearing it there was no room for anything else."

"Even with a nod to some of Hollywood’s best navel-gazing films, I will make a case that this is the best film ever made about filmmaking—made by one of the most self-referential of all filmmakers. Visually lush to the point of a Powell and Pressburger surfeit, Godard’s film lays bare a marriage in crisis. The long apartment sequence between Bardot and Piccoli is a dystopian analogue to the hotel room playful casualness of Seberg and Belmondo in Breathless. A back-to-back viewing of the two sequences constitutes a minihistory of the French New Wave. Raoul Coutard’s cinematography and Georges Delerue’s score give the Greek myth parallels of the film’s story line (and of the film-within-a-film trope) a sensuous subtext—music and image caressing the body of the star of And God Created Woman. It’s great to see Fritz Lang and Jack Palance, two polar opposite cinematic icons, in a room watching dailies. Below the screen is a running legend that reads, “Cinema is an invention without a future. Louis Lumière.” The film’s opening long shot over verbal titles—as the BNC anamorphic camera approaches the viewer along tracking rails, then pans and tilts so that Coutard’s lens points right at you—is one of those great “gotcha” cinematic moments."