"This used to get me when I was in college. I haven’t watched [Tarkovsky’s] films for years now, but they really got my goat. I did not understand anything. I just watched it, and I used to have a visceral reaction with them. And I haven’t seen them for about 20 years, but any of his [would make the list]. I think The Mirror, or even The Sacrifice, or Nostalghia — any one of those just blew my rocks off. Somebody like Polanski, he does a film with the devil or he does a thriller and his DNA is all over it. So when I look at the Tarkovsky films I just think like I could interchange all of them and watch them, each one of them just shook my world."

"The first time I watched this film, I was 13 years old, and I had no idea what kind of ‘war film’ to expect. My first reaction was that it was too slow; but as I got home that night, the poetry of the narrative, the visuals and the music began to sink in. I ended up dragging my friends to see it, watching the film five times in theaters; and though the film received mixed reactions at the time, I found Terrence Malick’s work to be a transformative meditation on the classic Transcendental themes of the brotherhood of man, self-sacrifice, and faith. It is only a ‘war film’ insofar as the war is a metaphor for the Darwinian struggle of survival in what seems an unjust world."