"Most people remember David Lean for his big-scale epics, like Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, or The Bridge on the River Kwai. But here he is at his most precise and poetic. Both movies are epics of the spirit, and both are plagued by grand, utterly magical moments and settings; whether showing Oliver’s mother straining and in pain, by intercutting with a flexing branch of thorns, or by lovingly lingering on Miss Havisham’s decaying splendor, Lean understand the need for hyperbole in order to manage the larger-than-life Dickensian archetypes. Some of the passages in both films skate the fine line between poetry and horror."

"There’s something about formalism that’s a little bit like music, and you can lose yourself in the joy of it when you make movies because it’s so much fun. This is one of those very rare subzero love stories, but it works because it’s like modernist poetry. It’s like when you have really hot food and you put it in the freezer and then you taste a little bit and you can sense that it was really hot but it’s been chilled down. Formalism doesn’t get any better than this, and every time I think about associative logic, this film is what I am thinking of."