"Alphaville is the New Wave grandfather of Blade Runner: a film that is at once in the past and far in the future. I’m a big Godard fan, and this is one of his great genre deconstructions: effortlessly cool and serious at the same time. Alphaville was my fourth Godard, and I saw it when I was nineteen. He’d already dismantled my mind with Pierrot le fou, Breathless, and Le petit soldat. I wish I could see those Godard films for the first time again."

"I’m a huge fan of Nagisa Oshima, and Empire of Passion and Violence at Noon are two of my favorites of his that Criterion has released. They give a good example of both his shifting stylistic capabilities as well as his consistently provocative and trenchant thematic tendencies. While both these films deal with elements of sexual obsession, predation, and social hegemony, on the surface they are totally distinct, Empire being a gorgeous, classically styled ghost story and Violence at Noon being a fractured, modernist New Wave masterpiece."

"I’m a huge fan of Nagisa Oshima, and Empire of Passion and Violence at Noon are two of my favorites of his that Criterion has released. They give a good example of both his shifting stylistic capabilities as well as his consistently provocative and trenchant thematic tendencies. While both these films deal with elements of sexual obsession, predation, and social hegemony, on the surface they are totally distinct, Empire being a gorgeous, classically styled ghost story and Violence at Noon being a fractured, modernist New Wave masterpiece."

"Blew my mind. I didn’t see it until I was middle-aged, after decades of thriving on the ongoing French New Wave. I thought of the New Wave as beginning in these subversive young Parisian cineastes’ love for American genre films. My jaw was dropped the whole length of Journey to see the sensibility and techniques of the New Wave appearing first in this Italian flick (though English-language, starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman). Later I read that Truffaut called it the “first modern movie,” and I believe he’s right. I haven’t researched, so don’t know if this is a commonplace, but, on a side note, it’s interesting to consider the parallels between Journey and Godard’s Contempt. They’re both about a couple whose marriage is failing, who are foreigners on a visit to Italy, where their stiff estrangement reaches a head amid the vital, pagan-slash-Catholic ancient culture of the area around Naples. Noble, erotically charged, millennia-old statuary reverently track-circled to swelling music. Local color, and travelogue landmarks of aesthetic and mythologically poetic power, integrated naturally into the story (almost Hitchcockian in a way, except with an emotional and intellectual justification). The most groundbreaking thing about it, though, is the way it’s not exactly a story, but rather a situation, depicted in fragments and episodes—the emotional situation of a couple, displaced within a continuously intruding, alien or disorienting environment, and one that keeps us conscious of death and history. A lot is pointedly artificial about it—to me the dialogue all feels like exposition, and is delivered that way, as presentation of the situation, rather than anything natural—or at least frankly cinema, but at the same time it feels like life in a way that movies hadn’t before."

"There’s Bonnie and Clyde. That’s a film that kind of started the new wave in the ’70s. That was incredible. I saw that when I was in about the eighth grade, I think. Those characters, and also the history of Bonnie and Clyde, you know… it was something new. I remember, in fact, Bonnie and Clyde came out in either late Spring or early Summer, and then it was pulled. I think it flopped when it came out, and then they brought it back out in the Fall. I mean, I loved it when I first saw it; then they brought it back out in the Fall and it was a huge success."

"The Japanese New Wave is almost synonymous with Nagisa Oshima. His film In the Realm of the Senses outraged critics and audiences alike with its many scenes of unsimulated sex. Here he takes similar themes of lust and murderous passion and explores them through the supernatural, crafting a ghost story that puts Japanese society and cultural conventions on trial in a masterful way. Who are the criminals here? Those who dare to pursue their feelings and impulses, or the society that forbids them the freedom to do just that?"