"I actually went to the theater as an eleven-year-old and saw this film in its original release. (I know. Weird.) The cinematography (Raoul Coutard), the editing (Françoise Bonnot won the Oscar), the score by Mikis Theodorakis, and the performances by Yves Montand, Irene Papas, and Jean-Louis Trintignant created an overall intensity that overwhelmed me. One of the most searing political thrillers ever made, and one of Costa-Gavras’s greatest, it won best foreign language film at the Academy Awards in 1970."

"Diane di Prima is a legendary poet and feminist. These poems are the embodiment of a woman seeing herself both as feminine and animalistic all at once. Di Prima is considered the only woman who was part of the Beat movement of poets, but in my opinion, she is the strongest voice out of all of them, even more than Allen Ginsberg. She always wrote fiercely and violently, truthfully and potently. She is a wholly original voice and this book was the first glimpse of that."

"It's one of those pictures that puts the lie to that idea that the sequel is never better than the original. Again, you have a filmmaker in James Whale who has now been given more resources to explore the same themes and issues as he did in the first film but he brings along with it an attitude towards the material and a result he doesn?t so much kid it as parody it. It?s a beautiful film to look at, extremely well acted, very witty."

"Stranger by the Lake (2013), the previous film by Guiraudie, is almost a perfect movie, one of the strongest in the last decade. But the wildness, lack of self-discipline and strangeness of Staying Vertical makes it, in my opinion, even more fascinating. The images, the scenes, are so powerful and original and surprising – you have no idea where you are heading to, and you feel that you can no longer count on the movie to save you. But you are so intensely and happily lost."