"Long, long takes of traffic accidents. Fascinating characters along the way. Many frustrated drivers and passengers unable to deal with matters of a complex world. The film delves into their personal dramas, and how the delay affects their plans. Cameraman Raoul Coutard is a friend of mine, and the long takes were considered a tour de force."

"A visual and aural feast. The best movie ever made about moviemaking. Greece and Brigitte Bardot provide the purest form of seduction; Jack Palance provides the sleaziest. The subtext that explains the title is sexual politics at its most provocative. Every frame of this movie is invigorating. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard and composer Georges Delerue deserve to be canonized. The already anointed Fritz Lang, playing himself, gives the film yet another pleasurable dimension of film truth."

"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."