"I love all of Mike Leigh’s films but this is the one that had a big impact on me. Like all of films above, it beautifully combines comedy and drama. It was also a stylistic departure for Leigh, who still held on to the British social-realism vibe but delivered it in a very cinematic and calculated way. Also should be seen for Katrin Cartlidge who had a very bright but tragically short career."

"Despite its grand place in the literary canon, “Middlemarch” is really a rich, gossipy boxed set of a novel. I first read this as a teenager in short bursts nightly with a torch after lights-out, and it gripped me like a soap opera. The foolishness of the human condition, the urgency of its whims and fancies, and the often blinding need to find meaning are unsparingly chronicled in this feast of a book."

"This is a book that everybody should read. It’s aneye-openerr. Giving many examples of the fact that our brain has plasticity, which most doctors don’t know. In fact, all doctors, at this point, are localizationists. When your brain is damaged, another part of the brain rewires itself and takes over the same function, making it possible for you to resume normalcy in your life. It is nothing short of miraculous. Get it!"

"Though the film takes place over a short period of time, you feel that the infinite is expressed in that one night. The elegance, the style, the decadence, and the existential crisis of everyone on-screen—all of those elements are so powerful when they are combined. There’s an intensity that can be generated by compressing the time frame of a film, and La notte is one of the great examples of that."

"For years I regarded Alf Sjöberg as the best director ever on the basis of this film. A stunning adaptation of a short play that is all set in a kitchen. Quite amazing, the way Sjöberg opens out and strengthens all the tensions and relationships in the story. Superb visuals. I’d love to see his Barabbas . . . a film of his I’ve never been able to track down, even when I went to Stockholm."

"I made a short film for the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival (Artaud Double Bill), which is a meditation on the scene where Anna Karina goes into a cinema to watch Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and sees Antonin Artaud on-screen. Something about this sequence seemed to define the essence of cinephilia. Perhaps it’s just the thought of seeing actors watch another film within a film I’m watching."