"I’ve got to say that this band were a massive influence on late-period Oasis. It was the one album I bought from a review because it said it was a bit like The Beatles, a bit like The Stones, a bit like The Who, really 60s-influenced and all the rest. I put it on the car stereo when I was driving to an Oasis gig and right from the start it was like, 'Wow.' It just blew me away, the lyrics, the playing. And then when we got to see them live and the singer was this giant fat dude. We ended up going on tour with them for two years. I watched them every single night and I thought they were incredible and they became really, really good friends and I still think that this album is a modern masterpiece."

"An utter masterpiece from the great Akira Kurosawa. Curiously, a Dashiell Hammet novel provided the inspiration for this film. I love that an American pulp novel from the 1920s was the spark for a staggering work of genius from Japan over three decades later. It demonstrates how art can transcend barriers across time, space, and culture and speak to us in a meaningful way. Yojimbo was remade as Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western classic A Fistful of Dollars, which I saw and loved long before I knew the original even existed. But when I discovered Yojimbo, it was like a gift from the universe. Everything else paled in comparison. Yojimbo is part western, part gangster noir, part samurai story, all awesome. It’s so good. Plus, if Kubo’s dad looks a wee bit like Kurosawa’s resplendent muse Toshiro Mifune, that’s not necessarily a coincidence."

"Apparently someone is writing a 33 1/3 book about this 1981 album, which is universally regarded as Japan's masterpiece. It features electric guitar sounds previously possible only for Adrian Belew; the bass is so fretless it sounds like a moaning sea mammal, the gorgeous drums are so tonal they could be marimbas, the Prophet 5 synthesizer sits quietly in the mix making squiggly noises; and sometimes a violin plays, in a manner previously heard only in Chinese opera. The lyric and visual emphasis is on modern Chinese culture (like Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) without the spy-spoof parts) but not Chinoiserie – no pentatonic xylophones – and the implication that the future is Chinese is no more threatening than Kraftwerk implying the future is German. "We're young and strong in this party, building our visions of China." "

"Antonioni’s great L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse are yet another linked trilogy, though their stories and characters are as disparate as those of the Rossellini trilogy. It may be the director’s hyper-refined architectural style that we remember most in this film, people lost in its urban landscape. But Antonioni was also very much a child of Italian neorealism, as we can trace in his early films and documentaries. The long, wordless sequence, devoid of the main characters, that concludes this film is justly cited as a masterpiece of visual alienation and loss. But the hectic frenzy of the Turin Bourse sequence, a near standalone set piece in the middle of the film, shows the director at his documentary best, even as the camera smoothly glides through the rushing masses of stock traders with a singular determination of its own mission"

"Clearly we’ll start here. I hope it’s fairly obvious, my adoration of it, but I think that what it represents is probably bigger than the actual film itself. It was the first film I’d ever seen that was really something I could identify with, so it has a big place in my heart and my mind. But actually, the more you went back and looked at The Firm, the more you could pick very small holes in it, you know. Whereas, obviously, I could talk about The Godfather, but there’s nothing you could find wrong with that — it’s a true masterpiece. What was amazing about the original Firm was Gary Oldman, and the brutality and the Steadicam and stuff like that. Because it was the first film that ever really affected me, it’s always going to have a place in my heart.”"