"I love all of Stanley Donen’s movies and I wanna put one of them in there. I’ll put Two for the Road, which I love. Audrey Hepburn, Stanley Donen’s movie. Those would be my five. Today. [Laughs] Tomorrow I’m gonna pick Claude Lelouch — And Now My Love. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that. It is amazing. It’s with an actress named Marthe Keller who made Bobby Deerfield with Al Pacino. And Now My Love is the story of two people who never meet until the end of the movie, and the protagonist is a kid who is a thief and gets sent to jail and learns how to use the camera in jail — and goes from making porno movies to making, you know, great movies, like Truffaut and Godard and Lelouch and the French new Wave. It’s really the best love story, and he’s an unsung hero of cinema, Claude Lelouch. Actually, that would be tied for Two for the Road — that way I get a sixth choice, and I’m greedy. [Laughs] Tie it. That’s a tie."

"I love all of Stanley Donen’s movies and I wanna put one of them in there. I’ll put Two for the Road, which I love. Audrey Hepburn, Stanley Donen’s movie. Those would be my five. Today. [Laughs] Tomorrow I’m gonna pick Claude Lelouch — And Now My Love. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that. It is amazing. It’s with an actress named Marthe Keller who made Bobby Deerfield with Al Pacino. And Now My Love is the story of two people who never meet until the end of the movie, and the protagonist is a kid who is a thief and gets sent to jail and learns how to use the camera in jail — and goes from making porno movies to making, you know, great movies, like Truffaut and Godard and Lelouch and the French new Wave. It’s really the best love story, and he’s an unsung hero of cinema, Claude Lelouch. Actually, that would be tied for Two for the Road — that way I get a sixth choice, and I’m greedy. [Laughs] Tie it. That’s a tie."

"One of my favorite mini-genres is the B crime movie from the late fifties and early sixties. It was a unique period in American cinema that gave birth to these half-cocked, no-budget movies that were made by some visionary filmmakers. They’re all super raw and gritty, very existential, and absolutely innovative in technique. It’s no wonder that the French New Wave filmmakers all discovered them and ripped them off (I’m looking at you, Jean-Pierre Melville). Movies like Don Siegel’s The Lineup and Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract (both of which have popped up on the new Criterion Channel recently!) embody this subgenre, but the high point for me is Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence, which seems to grow in stature every year. It’s hard to describe it. Imagine if Orson Welles was a crazed junkie on the Bowery in the late 1950s and somehow conned someone out of $20k to make a bleak movie about a hit man. It’s sorta part Point Blank, part Taxi Driver, part Shadows, and it’s as hardboiled as they come. It’s also one of the great New York City movies, with amazing time-capsule photography in all the boroughs and near pristine documentary coverage of streets. The Criterion disc also unearthed another absolute gem: a 1990 documentary in which Baron visits all the locations from the film. Oh, and the Criterion cover art, by comic artist Sean Phillips, is maybe my favorite cover! And the edition also includes a graphic novel based on the film! (Damn, should I have put this first?)"

"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."