"I love this movie and its revisionist style and its radical politics, but most importantly there is no more punk-rock move in cinema history than having the opening credits be the checks that you’re writing to the cast and crew. Godard—the rich-kid film nerd to end all rich-kid film nerds—gets the machinations of the motion picture “industry” better than any of us. Contempt is masterful, Weekend is a lark, Tout va bien burns everything to the ground."

"The Godfather. The palette of the movie, the colors. There’s something about the production design and the cinematography. Everything about that. I mean, I like the story, the characters, all that, but the thing, when I think of the movie — like if I’m flipping channels and it’s on, I have to stop and watch it — the thing that catches me is always just its rich, rich, rich deep palette. It’s incredible. I mean, they’re all great films, the first one especially. When I was a kid and it was on TV, I would always have to go make spaghetti and watch it. I could not watch that movie without having spaghetti and tomato sauce. There was just something so evocative about those guys making sauce in the kitchen."

"Akira Kurosawa made films covered in rich tapestries of Japanese history and charged with terrible violence and drama. Yet here, the contemporary and confined world of a rich industrialist (Toshiro Mifune) who is faced with an overwhelming decision is spare, cold, and objective in the extreme. Hideo Oguni, who worked on seven Kurosawa films, including Seven Samurai, wrote the screenplay based on an Ed McBain novel. Mifune, once again, shows why he is the Japanese Marlon Brando, Edward G. Robinson, and Gregory Peck rolled into one."

"This was a reading assignment in an MBA entrepreneurship class that I snuck into at Indiana University. Bottom line is that among the many patriotic things you can do, one is get rich and pay your taxes"

"For me, I felt like the main character [Solomon Northup] in what I’m dealing with, even as a mega-popular-rich-celebrity-fuck-you-who-do-you-think-you-are-to-complain-about-anything situation that I’m in"

"When I first watched “Pain and Glory” it called to mind the work of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, who, like Pedro Almodovar, continuously displayed their ability to fuse their own lives and art, taking elements from their personal experiences and creating a world with rich and complicated characters. Nowhere has Almodovar’s talent as a director been put to such excellent use as in “Pain and Glory.” Clearly his most personal and best film to date, it is a contemplative triumph, rich and elegant yet intimate and subtle…"

"Writer-director Preston Sturges’ most exuberant comedy — a film that’s easy to watch and hard to imagine, God-like in its love for and forgiveness of its protagonists. The Sturges cuisine transforms seemingly lunchmeat ingredients into a rich cinematic repast."