"In my drawings, I’ve been basing characters on Peter Lorre ever since seeing M. There is something so intriguing about a pathetic character. And no one has ever been this villainous and pitiful. He is one of my all-time favorite screen characters. I still get alarmed if I hear someone whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

"No filmmaker gets under my skin more consistently than Fritz Lang, and while M lacks some of the paranoid extravagance of his silent fantasies, it is flawless. Peter Lorre ingeniously incarnates the evolution from lizard to man, and the director’s every shot and sound underscores the excitement of cinema in the process of discovering its own power. One of the disc’s extras finds Claude Chabrol unsuccessfully attempting to mimic a Lang camera move. The new Criterion print, with a corrected aspect ratio and restored fade-out line, burnishes the film’s deathless vitality."

"It’s German expressionist film directed by Fritz Lang that broached pedophilia. Peter Lorre played a crazed madman who killed and molested children and all kinds of other stuff, and there was a child playing with a ball in one scene when she meets Lorre’s character. Even more horrific than anything else after she disappears, the camera shows the ball rolling down a hill until it finally stops moving. Your mind takes over, and does much more horrific things then the screen can. I think being obvious and throwing blood and guts at the screen is stupid.”

"It’s been years since I’ve read Patrick McGilligan’s Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, but if I recall correctly, toward the end of his life, Lang was coming around to the conclusion that M would be the best film he ever made. If so, I certainly wouldn’t argue with the man. If he were making films today, Lang would probably be known as something of a geek. An artsy geek, maybe, but one with, besides a remarkable sense of composition, a penchant for state-of-the-art technology, its possibilities and implications. Which makes the use of silence in his first talkie all the more impressive. The other major asset M’s got, of course, is Peter Lorre."