"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."

"Melville is a very, very dear filmmaker for me because I feel he suffers when he’s making a movie. He puts a lot of effort into it. I have a feeling that it doesn’t flow very naturally, but that’s exactly what I like, that he’s working and putting in so much of his own feelings and vision in a way that’s complicated for him. In Le silence de la mer, which is one of my favorite films ever, he creates this feeling of intimacy not through dialogue but through a space, a certain type of light, and the sounds of a specific place. How is it that, with a film, he can make you feel the weight of a living room and the solace it can give? It’s all about nostalgia and reminds me of the way I think of places in the past. I can imagine that Melville must have been an intense and passionate person, especially given how he deals with the past and his memories. Army of Shadows is done very intellectually and very elegantly. He’s always so classical—not in the sense of rules but in the sense of proportions and elegance, like something Greek and old. That’s a quality that belongs to people who were living during the Second World War, people from another era with an aspiration for a better humanity."