"It’s quite interesting how a film like this can work so well. The acting style is so uptight, but Kubrick creates such curiosity for the images and the structure and the narrative—I don’t know how he did it. I’ve rewatched it many times. There’s one scene that inspired the monkey imitation scene in The Square. A boy is taking his kid brother into the room where his mom is playing the cembalo. He’s wearing these wooden shoes, violating the strict etiquette of the room, and they start to fight. They actually used handheld cameras for that scene. When you think of Barry Lyndon, you don’t think of handheld cameras!"

"Agnès Varda’s New Wave masterpiece about a famous singer/fashion model who abandons her blond wig and rediscovers her identity on the streets of Paris is jam-packed with vivid detail, an expressive graphic style, and an eye for urban chaos, and is at least as engaging and inventive as Breathless and The 400 Blows. While waiting for this film to enter its rightful place in the canon of great movies, buy it now and enjoy its distinctly up-to-date sensibility. More than forty years after it was made, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a perfect movie for our times, digging beneath the surface of fashion and celebrity culture."