"I’ve probably seen this film more than any other. Nestor Almendros turned me on to it when I was looking for a DP to shoot Iguana. He recommended Luis Cuadrados, but I soon discovered he’d died of a brain tumor, having shot Spirit while 95 percent blind. He had his assistant describe the sets to him, then told him where to place the lights, and the intensity of each. The film itself is one of the greatest homages to movies ever made, but it’s also a poignant study of that traumatic moment in everyone’s childhood when you discover the reality of death."

"The late, great Edward Yang’s final film is a sublime study of a Taipei family’s tensions and collisions across time that begs the question of what more we could have seen from this deeply sensitive artist. Something about the cinematic philosophy he offers in this movie manages to help answer that unfathomable question. Shohei Imamura’s eccentric film puts forward the deeply uncomfortable notion that a housewife can find a way out of her abusively loveless marriage by escaping with the burglar who raped her. The story is absolutely nuts, and the emotional transformation our weary protagonist makes is both bold and well-deserved."

"The late, great Edward Yang’s final film is a sublime study of a Taipei family’s tensions and collisions across time that begs the question of what more we could have seen from this deeply sensitive artist. Something about the cinematic philosophy he offers in this movie manages to help answer that unfathomable question. Shohei Imamura’s eccentric film puts forward the deeply uncomfortable notion that a housewife can find a way out of her abusively loveless marriage by escaping with the burglar who raped her. The story is absolutely nuts, and the emotional transformation our weary protagonist makes is both bold and well-deserved."

"I purchased this around the time that I decided I needed to own as many Criterion titles as possible. Also may hold my personal record for shortest time between first seeing a film and spending thirty dollars to own it. I just loved this film and was always rewatching it. Jarmusch was fairly major for me in my early discovery of truly lo-fi independent cinema, and I often found myself returning to his earlier films to study just how simple a film can be and still seem wildly innovative and truly, idiosyncratically the director’s own."