"An incredibly bold portrait of Ian Curtis’s life, which manages to take his story away from mythology really convincingly. You’re shown a young man trying to balance life in music and his illness with a domestic existence, and the performances of Sam Riley as Curtis and Samantha Morton as his wife, Deborah, are very powerful. I wasn’t a huge Joy Division fan when they were around – I was studying nearby in Liverpool – but this film absolutely captures the mood of that time, as does the black-and-white cinematography. It also nails that struggle of being an artist and a human being. That isn’t captured enough."

"This fifth film from von Sternberg and Dietrich is their apotheosis, delirious and excessive, with the most perfectly controlled photography (by Bert Glennon) of any black-and-white film ever made. Dietrich never looked more beautiful, nor flaunted her signature decadent Dietrich persona more fully. Their sixth and final film, The Devil Is a Woman, harshly photographed by von Sternberg himself, just didn’t work. But after The Scarlet Empress, it’s not surprising that neither director nor actor had anywhere better to go, as this film summed up and concluded the greatest actor-director collaboration in film history. And the supporting performances by Louise Dresser, as the empress, and Sam Jaffe, as the mad emperor, are really superb."

"It’s hard to believe a movie like this was once considered not only culturally impactful but mainstream. If The Last Picture Show could even get made today, I’m sure it would make a hundred dollars at art houses in New York and Los Angeles before going to Netflix in a month. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, not far from the setting of The Last Picture Show. Though I lived there in the seventies and early eighties and not the early fifties . . . though my town was in color and not black-and-white . . . Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry evoke the way life felt for me. I knew some Sam the Lions, was closely related to some of them. As the movie suggests, they are now extinct. Every element of this film succeeds, and yet it is bigger than the sum of its parts. A profound film about the vanishing of character in America."