"Clouzot’s gripping film about a group of men driving a truck full of nitroglycerine to end a mining disaster is, although it could not be more French, one of the great buddy pictures of all time, with a degree of white-knuckle suspense that has never been bettered, before or sense. It is, or could be, an elegy to the French film industry, which in its heyday could produce films of every kind that captured an international audience, and is now pretty much reduced to love stories or French comedies that, with rare exceptions, seldom seem funny to foreigners."

"Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, it’s a taut and very telling film about the French/Algerian war of independence, concentrating on the battle of the Kasbah in the capital city of Algiers. A brilliant, prescient, and very humane film with very few “professional” actors. In black and white."

"The film debut of Vince Cassel, this film documents the Paris riots of the early 1990s. Filmed in black and white, it is an intimate look at French youth. The music is killer, the performances almost come through the camera, and hoodlums have never seemed so hip."

"I watched this film at a small theater in Paris, with an audience of mostly French people in their sixties. In that environment, it actually managed to resensitize me to cinema violence, something I assumed was impossible. Hearing the gasps from the audience allowed me to see the film as intended. These poor old French people were being assaulted by the film. It was rocking their world! When the lights came up, I was both upset by the film and delighted by the expressions on the faces around me. We were all just looking at each other in silence. After that, I better understood the power of a collective cinema experience."

"It is remembered as one of the first French New Wave films. I remember the emotion when the last image of the film was a freeze-frame of the young boy protagonist."

"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."

"This was the first French—maybe the first foreign—film I ever saw, and, as it turned out, one of the most romantic. The notion of undying love labeled me forever, and I loved it."

"When I first saw it, I had never seen anything like it. I knew nothing about filmmaking. But I knew that the guy with that French name had made a film that was changing the rules."