"I love all of his stuff from A Love Supreme onwards. I love the whole spiritual nature of those tunes. Love Supreme was his hymn to god and it sounds like it. Whenever I hear that first track it makes me think of opening a window and all this fresh, clean spring air coming in. It's uplifting, in the tradition of gospel, but abstracted. All of his stuff from that point onwards was a hymn. It's constantly influential and inspiring."

"It’s ridiculously sentimental in some parts and maddeningly intrusive in others, and the heart of it depends on the hoary cliché of all white men being virulently racist as a matter of course. And yet . . . who can forget it once they’ve seen it? It’s urgent, unapologetic, and irrepressibly alive. Aliens from the future could find no more fitting an artifact to see America’s soul at the tail end of the twentieth century than Spike Lee’s tone poem to human nature and human chaos."

"The zenith for both Pabst and star Louise Brooks—the latter has become almost solely emblematic of the flapper age because of this film! Adapted from playwright Franz Wedekind’s story of Lulu, a preternaturally powerful beauty blithely strolling through the mating marshlands of the world, where nature is savagely cruel to both the pursuers and the pursued. Watch this film at different stages of your romantic life span and behold your sympathies shifting all over the place! Ouch! Gorgeous! Ouch, again!"

"Two words: David Thewlis. He gives one of those performances that you can’t believe actually exist. He is an absolute force of nature in this film, playing what is essentially an extremely unlikable character that you can’t help but be completely compelled by. It’s the most verbal movie since His Girl Friday, and experiencing the nonstop dialogue that comes out of Thewlis’s mouth is like witnessing all of the world’s greatest jazz artists playing a euphoric two-hour concert at once."