"In one of the most indelible scenes of the early French New Wave, Jeanne Moreau searches for her lover in rain-swept Paris streets, accompanied by the only film score that Miles Davis ever composed. Her iconic suit was designed by Chanel, as were her dresses in another 1958 Louis Malle classic, The Lovers. The actress and designer saw each other often, loving to share anecdotes and book recommendations in Chanel’s personal library."

"Already their second studio album, they had scored hit singles with 'Denis Denis' (I first heard that on my Grandad's window cleaning round) and the sublime 'I'm Always Touched By Your (Presence Dear)', still one of my favourites to this very day. As a whole album, it sounds like a spy movie soundtrack with 'Contact In Red Square' and 'Kidnapper'. Highlights for me include 'I'm On E' and 'Love At The Pier'. The very definition of late 70s New York pop art and punk glamour; Deborah Harry, for me, will remain forever the Queen of New Wave."

"A really good punk song. They had a really great ear for punk. They actually fused punk with metal, but it wasn't 70s Punk, it was kinda new wave punk. That's what I get from it, anyway: The Exploited, and Anti-Pasti. They probably weren't listening to it, but that's what I get. And there's obviously a bit of glam in there from the New York Dolls. "The songs are slightly ruined by the fucking production. It's a bit too much, and sometimes Axl's voice borders on the insane - it's like, 'what the fuck is that?' - but that's rock, isn't it?"

"Could listen to this on repeat forever and ever. It’s slightly nostalgic and melancholic but still really groovy. It doesn’t take me back to a specific memory but it does remind me of being a kid – there’s a warm fuzzy feeling that hits me when I hear this song. When I was growing up it was all about singles because that’s how my mom listened to music – she’d never buy the whole record. I guess that’s how I grew up. I’m just starting to get more into DJing and singles are pretty key to that. As of late, I’m listening to Sirius satellite radio, and there’s this channel called 1st Wave that plays rarer new wave and dance songs – not just the hits. I’ve been using that to collect songs for my sets – the stuff that gets overlooked. Stuff like this."

"The music is so beautiful, and the people are so beautiful. I first saw this as a very young kid, and I just remember being captivated by the sensuality of the story and those moments with everyone dancing in the street. This movie opened up my world—I’d never seen black people’s lives portrayed in such an artistic, almost New Wave-y style. And I don’t know if I’d ever seen a film about black people that was this romantic."

"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."