"Louis Malle is one of the great, underrated French directors. That’s the best film I’ve ever seen about children. It’s a very, very adult film so of course you have to take the kids very seriously. What is it they say? ‘Kids are father to the man,’ or something like that. What you are is what you were, really. It’s one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen; one of the saddest, most moving, genuine films ever. As a director I’ve done kids films — Slumdog has kids, and, I made a film called Millions — and it’s not easy to get kids to be good. You work hard at it. What is really difficult is to get every kid to be in the same film at the same time and I watch that film and every kid — and there’s a lot of kids in it, it takes place at a school — they’re all in the same film at the same time."

"See above . . . the French really know how to do sex and bodies and affairs and palettes. Never had I seen a film on this subject treated and shot with such levity and ease. I also feel it’s necessary to note how major Agnès Varda is as an individual, having made a lane all her own alongside so many a male contemporary."

"Originally issued as Reign of Terror, Anthony Mann’s Classics-Illustrated-meets-film-noir treatment of the French revolution is one of the most striking low budget period pieces to come from Hollywood, abetted by graphic b/w imagery from the great d.p. John Alton and striking production design from the always reliable William Cameron Menzies. Plus it’s witty moves like lightning."

"A completely different kind of samurai film. Actually, it’s a French gangster movie. It’s clear that director Jean-Pierre Melville digs old American gangster movies and filters that affection into creating his own unique genre. This is my favorite of his films. I first saw this baby when it was rereleased in theaters a few years ago, and was completely entranced."

"I’ve never been very fond of Fellini—too baroque for me. But La dolce vita is an amazing film, summing up an era, a culture, a city; in its own way it is of historical importance. Maybe it is the great Italian film of that period, in the same way that The Mother and the Whore, by Jean Eustache, is the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city, a time, a culture now all gone. My admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville has only been growing through the years. He is a minimalist, like Bresson, but not so much in the sense of emptying the frame—it’s more about getting rid of a lot of the visible to replace it with the invisible. I haven’t been filming a lot of gangsters, but I can understand his fascination for both outlaws and cops, for their world haunted by betrayal and death. In Army of Shadows, he adapts a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel and makes the ultimate film of the French Resistance. Both Kessel and Melville had been involved with the Free French, and here cinema meets history. A great artist carried by historical circumstances transcends not just his own inspiration but the medium. Army of Shadows is not only one of the most important French films, it is also a national treasure."

"I’ve never been very fond of Fellini—too baroque for me. But La dolce vita is an amazing film, summing up an era, a culture, a city; in its own way it is of historical importance. Maybe it is the great Italian film of that period, in the same way that The Mother and the Whore, by Jean Eustache, is the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city, a time, a culture now all gone. My admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville has only been growing through the years. He is a minimalist, like Bresson, but not so much in the sense of emptying the frame—it’s more about getting rid of a lot of the visible to replace it with the invisible. I haven’t been filming a lot of gangsters, but I can understand his fascination for both outlaws and cops, for their world haunted by betrayal and death. In Army of Shadows, he adapts a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel and makes the ultimate film of the French Resistance. Both Kessel and Melville had been involved with the Free French, and here cinema meets history. A great artist carried by historical circumstances transcends not just his own inspiration but the medium. Army of Shadows is not only one of the most important French films, it is also a national treasure."