"In a normal world, one would go out and walk into just any theater to see a film by Jacques Tati. Or Chaplin."

"Jacques Tati is one of my heroes, and this film, I believe, is his best. It parodies the influence of modern architecture and design in the late 50s. Also, Mr. Tati used just the visuals to tell a story and make people laugh. Very deadpan. I also generally discard dialogue to make the imagery carry the plot and humor."

". . . because I’ve seldom laughed so hard in a film and because I got to know Jacques Tati in the late sixties, around the time he was making Playtime and I was just beginning to direct."

"A truly singular achievement. Roy Andersson, an artist who has taken aesthetic perfectionism to an absurd extreme, is a world treasure. If Jacques Tati merged with Ingmar Bergman and then got beaten up by Gary Larson, you'd have something approximating Andersson's sensibility – but it still wouldn't be anywhere near as wonderful."

"At a film festival conference a few decades past, I was asked by a solemn journalist which French director has had the most influence on me. I expressed undying appreciation of Truffaut, Godard, Renoir, but stated that the most accurate answer was that Jacques Tati left an indelible mark when I saw this film as a boy. The French hated that answer—Tati was out of favor at the time. Funny how that works. This film remains one of the most hilarious, affectionate, politely barbed creations. For me it’s a cinematic standard for human comedy."

"This is art concealing art. On the face of it, the film is a gentle satire of French bourgeois life on holiday. There is no story, just Hulot (Jacques Tati himself) drifting innocently through a holiday resort, leaving a trail of confusion behind him. The gags are wonderful, apparently effortless, the situations natural. In reality, the film is the extraordinary creation of a man obsessed with perfection. Each move, each image was planned in detail by Tati until the gags were immaculate; the tennis ball that bounces off the head of the serious little girl curtsying to her elders, the paint pot that floats out to sea, then back on the opposite side of the beached fishing boat; everything apparently natural, everything the product of intense creativity."

"Okay, I’m going to do a hybrid again. Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and Playtime; I’m going to put those two together. One’s sort of spun off the other, in a way, but you could put either, because it’s really about Tati himself, and the conceptual art of his films. The film that has almost no dialogue, just gibberish and music and human behavior, and staging. Competition is staging, which I found fascinating. They seduce you into paying attention to the simplest of details."

"Okay, I’m going to do a hybrid again. Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and Playtime; I’m going to put those two together. One’s sort of spun off the other, in a way, but you could put either, because it’s really about Tati himself, and the conceptual art of his films. The film that has almost no dialogue, just gibberish and music and human behavior, and staging. Competition is staging, which I found fascinating. They seduce you into paying attention to the simplest of details."

"As I was a young film fan growing up in a VCR-less household in rural England, my access to international cinema was limited to whatever was playing on the (then) four channels of network television. Which basically meant that Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy and Jacques Tati were some of the only European films I saw until I was in my late teens. During a brief art college stint, my eyes were opened as I was exposed to surrealism. First Luis Buñuel’s Un chien Andalou and L’age d’or, but then later, my favorite film of his, the 1972 masterpiece The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Dipping into the history of cinema is an exciting yet overwhelming task for some. When appreciating older works, I like to contextualize by tracing back to them from their influences. So if the work of Buñuel ever seems daunting, know this: he directly influenced Monty Python, and John Landis was inspired by this movie for a classic shock sequence in An American Werewolf in London. I know that has now inspired some of you to watch the film immediately. Buñuel has a fiendishly prankish sense of humor to go along with his endless smarts. If you have never watched a film of his, this is a good place to start."

"I guess I’ll have to start with Songs from the Second Floor, which is a film by Roy Andersson, who is a brilliant Swedish filmmaker who basically… He made a feature in the ’70s called A Swedish Love Story that is a really wonderful, strange, funny, acerbic commentary on Sweden that became this huge hit. I think it was the biggest hit ever in Sweden. And then he delved into making commercials for a long time, and he developed this new style over the course of something like 300, 400, 500 commercials. Then, in the early 2000s, he came out with this film that took him several years to make called Songs from the Second Floor, which is like a parody of obsessive perfectionism. He’s very similar Jacques Tati in that he works primarily with stationary wide shots, and he’s always building sets. All of the sets in his films are built from scratch, and the reason his films take so long to make is because each each vignette is one shot, and the set for that shot tends to take a month to build. There’s just like these gorgeous paintings, and there’s this really singular, dark, dry, sad wit driving everything he does. Since Songs from the Second Floor he’s come out with two other films that play like spiritual sequels, You the Living and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, which I think you can see on Netflix. But Songs from the Second Floor remains the most perfect of the films, in my opinion."