"This film wanders through the winter French countryside, the landscape working in tandem with the mood, the bleakness punctuated with flashes of humor and feeling. I love the use of music in this film—the jukebox scene is mind-blowing."

"I remember the title Les enfants du paradis. A young woman teacher said that French film is really important, and that I should see it. I saw it and I liked it, and obviously I remember it, but I don’t know why."

"For me, Breathless and Vivre sa vie were a revelation, a new concept of cinema. Pierrot added an emotional and cinematic extra level: color, widescreen, the French landscape, the beauty of its stars, its casual use of experimentation both visual and narrative."

"For me, Breathless and Vivre sa vie were a revelation, a new concept of cinema. Pierrot added an emotional and cinematic extra level: color, widescreen, the French landscape, the beauty of its stars, its casual use of experimentation both visual and narrative."

"For me, Breathless and Vivre sa vie were a revelation, a new concept of cinema. Pierrot added an emotional and cinematic extra level: color, widescreen, the French landscape, the beauty of its stars, its casual use of experimentation both visual and narrative."

"Its bathroom-reading title belies this astonishing, hilarious analysis of reading, memory, shame and the everyday fraud of shared experience — the illusion of consensus that is the glue of our conversational social contract. Written by a drolly self-effacing French professor of literature."

"Brilliantly researched, this book transports you vividly into the world of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a mixed-race nobleman and soldier during the French Revolution who inspired his son, Alexandre Dumas, to write The Count of Monte Cristo. It is a must-read."

"The title of the film refers to “the gods”—in French, le paradis—that upper gallery in a theater where the seats are cheap and the audience boisterous. Throughout the film, we are the audience watching parallel stories in which the world of the stage, presented largely in mime, mirrors the “real-life” setting, itself of course a fiction shown on the screen. Through the obvious theatricality of the stage and the far subtler theatricality of the “real” story, we follow a tale of love, loss, and revenge straight from late nineteenth-century French literature but reinvigorated by the magic of film."