"If I really like a film, I’ll go back and watch it over and over. I’ll study a film if I really like it. (The 2008 Swedish horror hit) ‘Let The Right One In,’ I probably watched 15 times"

"Cinema is most often analogized with dreaming (see Hollywood as “dream factory”), but it is also a kind of remembering: it manufactures an immediate past, and thus makes us retrospectively and prospectively older. Bergman’s Wild Strawberries starts with a dream and ends with a memory, aligning its beauty with the beauty of its seventy-seven-year-old star, the great Swedish actor and director Victor Sjöström."

"The television (read: long) version of Bergman’s X-ray of a married couple is, of course, insightful, heartbreaking, painfully true, and oddly hilarious, but it’s also one very unexpected thing: riveting. Put the first episode on at a decent hour and see if you can stop watching the entire set. It’s like the Swedish 24, except you can still go to parties and claim not to watch television."

"A film of perfectly realized proportions about broken marriages and failed utopian ideals. Slyly understated and very funny, this portrait of a Swedish commune in the mid 1970s is filled with vivid, affectionately-drawn characters, incredibly sympathetic children, and, in the end, a profoundly moving final scene. When I have lost hope in humanity (which sadly occurs more frequently than I would like) I re-watch this stirringly beautiful film and feel my faith in the world restored."