"McCarthy are indie icons of ours – we’ve covered at least three of their songs. They showed how you could fuse music and politics. They were one of the great protest bands but it was never the gurning, spittle-in-your-face confrontational stance that some bands take. There was always some kind of sarcasm in there that would cut its subject down to its knees, and this lyric is a perfect example of that. It talks to working-class disaffection and foreshadows New Labour’s obsession with gentrification and trying to drag people into the new culture with Wi-Fi and coffee houses everywhere: “Once there was class war/ But not any longer/ Because, baby, we are all bourgeois now.”"

"Weird Sex. Obsession. Comic Books.” is how this film was billed. Each category alone is enough to put this on a top ten list. Crumb falls into a rare group of documentaries. A hero like R. Crumb is so reclusive and so fickle about who he allows to get close to him, but close they get. He’s a Slob over Snob for life. This film is more about Charles Crumb, the hidden master in the family, then it is about Robert. The art alone, like with many Criterions, is a reason to own this and present it on a shelf. Though here, there’s something very appropriate about having a DVD among your old issues of Weirdo or Zap. "

"Taken together, Edward Yang’s two masterpieces run nearly seven hours. I would give almost anything for more of either. Mathematically structured and teeming with ideas, characters, wisdom, and feeling, they move with astonishing humanity through every big thing: love, family, alienation, technology, cinema, politics, globalism, history, regret, obsession, murder, sex, time, adolescence, and so much more. Despite their novelistic hugeness, Yang’s genius feels approachable rather than impossible. (As opposed to Hou Hsiao-hsien, for example.) This quality also inspires the tantalizing thought that, hey, I could do that. No, no I can’t. I really encourage listening to the wonderful commentaries on both: Edward Yang and critic Tony Rayns for Yi Yi, and, in an act of epic insight, Rayns solo for A Brighter Summer Day."

"Taken together, Edward Yang’s two masterpieces run nearly seven hours. I would give almost anything for more of either. Mathematically structured and teeming with ideas, characters, wisdom, and feeling, they move with astonishing humanity through every big thing: love, family, alienation, technology, cinema, politics, globalism, history, regret, obsession, murder, sex, time, adolescence, and so much more. Despite their novelistic hugeness, Yang’s genius feels approachable rather than impossible. (As opposed to Hou Hsiao-hsien, for example.) This quality also inspires the tantalizing thought that, hey, I could do that. No, no I can’t. I really encourage listening to the wonderful commentaries on both: Edward Yang and critic Tony Rayns for Yi Yi, and, in an act of epic insight, Rayns solo for A Brighter Summer Day."