"Ranks with the best of Hitchcock, who wanted to make it but Clouzot beat him to the rights. It was made in the same year as Night and Fog and The Night of the Hunter, 1955—what a year, what a decade for world cinema. The penultimate scene had the same effect on me as Psycho. Though it no longer holds surprises for me, I watch it for its mastery of suspense and the performances of Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, and
 Véra Clouzot. But I confess that the nine-minute scene without words where 
Véra hears noises from her bedroom, goes down the hall to check them out, and is literally scared to death still nails me. You can bet I thought 
about how it was shot and paced when I sent Ellen Burstyn up to that attic in The Exorcist. No nudity, no sexuality, no violence, just pure, slow-building suspense that escalates to terror. The original novel was written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also wrote Vertigo."

"One of the reasons this movie is important to me is that I’m a big fan of personal storytelling; people who tell their own stories and tell them vividly and honestly, and without sentimentality. It’s such a beautiful, naturalistic film, but unlike a lot of movies about children, it is devoid of sentimentality, but it’s also incredibly rich with emotion, which are two different things. It’s a painful movie in a lot of ways, but it’s just never cheap. There’s nothing cheap about the depiction of that young man’s life. It’s also one of the best child performances I’ve ever seen in a movie, because he’s a very specific character, but there’s nothing about him that feels forced, or that the filmmakers are trying to make you like him or pity him in a phony way. Jean-Pierre Leaud clearly had something special that is fascinating to watch; he’s really funny and charming, but also it’s strange to see a child character depicted so richly — he’s got flaws, there are sh***y things about him, but he captures all of it."

"The first time I can remember hearing a synthesiser was sometime in the late '70s. I must have been eight or nine and I was on a driving holiday with my parents in the Pyrenees. 'I Feel Love' was on the radio and it freaked me right out. It scared me; that sequence flipped me out. 2000AD had just launched and I was really, deeply into it. All the stories were about terrifying dystopias and that song coming out of the radio sounded like a herald for one of those places. Years later, Silver Apples pushed similar buttons for me. They came about when synthesisers were more readily associated with almost academic music – people like Pierre Henry, Morton Subotnick, musique concrète stuff. Silver Apples created a sound I'd never heard before. The closest comparison (with a bit of hindsight) is something like NEU! – that driven, motorik sound. Silver Apples were before the first NEU! record by a few years. They sounded futuristic in name and sound; they built their own gear and credited the synth as a member of the band (The Simeon). There's a real toughness to the music, something very street."

"The thing that makes The Vanishing so chilling is its unorthodox structure. It starts with a girl being kidnapped at a service station while her boyfriend waits in the car. Then the story picks up three years later with the boyfriend still searching for her while her killer monitors his movements. From very early on we know who the killer is, and we’re fairly sure that the girl is long dead. What makes the film special is that it retains its tension despite giving so much away so early on. There’s an incredible balance of likability and abject coldness in Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu’s performance as the villain; the character is a seemingly respectable family man who, unbeknownst to his wife and children, is in fact a textbook sociopath. Watching him as he patiently plans out the crime makes us feel like we are watching a car crash in slow motion. We know there’s nothing we can do to stop what’s going to happen; in fact it’s already happened. Stanley Kubrick cited this as the most terrifying film he had ever seen. And I can see why."

"Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a filmmaker that I’ve since followed, you know, throughout his career and I think he’s one of my favorites and a kind of, you know, a very distinctive voice in France, but that film still I think is probably my favorite of his. I feel like he kind of almost returned to form a little bit with Micmacs. Micmacs really reminded me of Delicatessen in terms of its vibe. But Delicatessen is just, there’s a great amount of comedy to it, the characters are so bizarre and so well-drawn. The world is so strange, it’s not totally relatable. It’s very funny. It’s very dark. I remember when I saw that movie, I’d never seen anything like it. And I think by the time I saw Delicatessen for the first time, City of Lost Children had already come and gone. But Delicatessen was the first thing that I’d seen. And , you know, from an art direction standpoint, I think I was also so unbelievably impressed, because it was him and his partner, and I can’t remember his partner’s name who was also kind of like his art director."

"Jean Pierre-Melville was the undisputed master of the French crime drama. Here he turns his gaze on the French Resistance during World War II (of which he himself was a member) in an entirely unsentimental, unflinching portrait. It not only de-romanticizes the movement with its rigorous and austere account of the day-to-day operations in this gray world, it also indicts it. For all the good the Resistance did, its members were only human: prone to betrayal and petty revenge. The movie is so specific in its regard of the loneliness and fear of these operatives, whose everyday lives alternate between boredom and peril. Unreleased in this country for thirty-seven years, the film was an absolute revelation to me when I saw it upon its release in 2006. Already a major fan of Melville’s crime films, I loved how this one both expands and distills his unique technical skills and his ability to tap into his characters’ emotional states. What emerges is something both complex in design and deeply personal. Casablanca it is not. Melville shows us the inner workings of something so intricate and important while also asking us whether the ends truly justify the means."