"Mizoguchi is a filmmaker I discovered pretty early. When I was younger, I watched anything Scorsese recommended, and I saw an interview with him where he referenced Ugetsu. I just fell in love with Mizoguchi’s work. He called the Academy ratio the “painterly ratio,” and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame. Sansho the Bailiff is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen, and Ugetsu is a beautiful, ethereal ghost story. His films are quiet while also being extremely harsh and brutal. There’s a clinical, distant quality to his films, but there’s also this aching humanity at the heart of everything he did."

"Mizoguchi is a filmmaker I discovered pretty early. When I was younger, I watched anything Scorsese recommended, and I saw an interview with him where he referenced Ugetsu. I just fell in love with Mizoguchi’s work. He called the Academy ratio the “painterly ratio,” and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame. Sansho the Bailiff is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen, and Ugetsu is a beautiful, ethereal ghost story. His films are quiet while also being extremely harsh and brutal. There’s a clinical, distant quality to his films, but there’s also this aching humanity at the heart of everything he did."

"For some reason, Maurice Pialat doesn’t get the same attention here in the States as his contemporary Cassavetes. But I feel he deserves just as much. Without this film, we wouldn’t have Sandrine Bonnaire, and the complexity of the family dynamic is like nothing I’ve ever seen before on film. I’m proud to be neighbors with Tom Stevens, the actor who played the young American tourist. We were speaking in our New York City apartment building stairwell, and Tom told me that he had been in “a little film that you probably never heard of called À nos amours”—I nearly fell down the stairs. The extras are fantastic on the release, including an interview with Catherine Breillat."

"The ultimate existential gangster film. Hypnotic, detailed, ritualistic, it has influenced
 films like John Woo’s The Killer and the more recent Drive. Alain Delon
 gives his most memorable performance as an ice-cold assassin above such mundane
 concerns as moral conscience. Though violent in its subject matter, Jean-Pierre
 Melville’s film is also cool, meticulously lit, and classically framed. It
 operates in a kind of dream state. It’s the opposite of the fevered emotional style of
 most gangster films. The pauses and silences help make it the visual equivalent of Harold
 Pinter’s dialogue. This is my favorite Melville film, and the extras are among 
Criterion’s finest, including an interview with John Woo and one with Melville himself."

"This is really a sneaky way to list all of Criterion’s editions of Wes Anderson’s films. Tenenbaums is by far my favorite, but Rushmore, The Life Aquatic, and the new edition of Bottle Rocket are all pretty fantastic, too. I’m always immediately won over by the artwork and illustrations that tie all his films together. Even with different artists (Ian Dingman and Eric Chase Anderson) there is a consistency, due in no small part to Wes Anderson’s own particular aesthetic, that makes these films feel like four stories from the same hyperreal, idyllically melancholy world. There’s an interview in the Tenenbaums supplements section with artist Miguel Calderon that’s totally worth a listen."