"This is such a markedly wicked satire on the life of a tempted devotee. I can imagine that it was quite scandalous to many people when it debuted in 1965. I prefer Simon of the Desert’s austere qualities over the more outlandish subject matter and bold palette of later Buñuel. It does, however, have one of the strangest and most bombastic plot twists of all the Buñuels. I guarantee that you won’t see it coming, and it will definitely leave you scratching your head."

"This is as close to a perfect film as I have ever seen. Thousands of years of humanity honing the blade of satire culminated in this searing parody from Stanley Kubrick. Typically his direction is the star of his films, but the performances here from Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, and Sterling Hayden turn this into a perfectly pitched collaboration among artists who were, at that moment in history, each firing on all cylinders. Sellers in particular excels in three completely different roles. It’s a true master class in character acting."

"To me, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the funniest movie ever made. There are influences in this film that caused me to write Black Dynamite. I’m such a Monty Python Fan. I think that the layers of humor go from absurdly silly to very intellectual and then you have the physical humor on top of that. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie as physically and mentally funny with the brilliance of satire and political humor underneath it. This movie is just so layered, and again it is what influenced me in writing Black Dynamite."

"I first saw this movie on a third-generation bootleg without subtitles while I was making my first real movie, Modern Love Is Automatic. It changed the way I made that movie (there were pickup shots in Modern Love that were slated “Jeanne Dielman, take 1”) and the way I thought about movies, art, and time in general. This movie never gets enough credit for how funny and tense it is—it’s equal parts scathing satire and deconstruction/reinvention of the Hitchcockian thriller. Film financiers of the world, give all your money to twentysomething Belgian women."