"Technicolor is one of my weaknesses, and Douglas Sirk has a way with ahead-of-its-time drama unlike few others."

"A bunch of nuns move into a wind-addled old pleasure dome in the Himalayas and have trouble remembering their vows. The air is set aquivering by the most innocuous male approach to their world—even Sabu seems to shake their virginal resolve. And even I have trouble keeping my priest’s collar straight as the unspoken pressures build up to boiler-breaking levels. Technicolor at its most eye-popping!"

"A classic, and I grew up loving Judy Garland, and Bert Lahr is an amazing actor. As a child I watched it over and over again. It just represents the magic of moviemaking. I love how it goes from black-and-white to technicolor. My dad was a big Judy Garland fan growing up, so we would hear all these stories about her and the old studio system, so that’s one of my favorites."

"The fifteen-minute ballet sequence is so unforgettable. The cinematography is rich in a painterly, reddish-hued Technicolor. I resisted seeing this movie for years, thinking I wouldn’t be into it, but ended up completely absorbed and fascinated. Now I’ve seen it many times and still can’t get over how amazing it is. The ballerina played by Moira Shearer is torn between two men, and strangely, it’s the villain who I find myself rooting for."

"Hey, storytellers: if you’re adapting a classic, this is film school 101. Never before or since (though I love Black Swan for trying) has anyone achieved what Powell and Pressburger did here, in terms of character and theme. Add the beautiful work of Jack Cardiff and you achieve something of which I, personally, can only hope to replicate a glimmer as a visual storyteller in comics and animation: Technicolor atmosphere that conveys immediate emotion and also has a lasting impact."

"Singin’ in the Rain. I’ll put that up there. I now watch that with kids, which I love. I’ve always loved that film. My five-year-old son loves the “Make ‘Em Laugh” sequence as much as I ever did, and that’s just delightful. It’s a wonderful film about film, which is so often a great source of enjoyment. In glorious Technicolor. I don’t know. It’s funny — I’m sort of now re appreciating it through my kids but the scene where the dubbing goes wrong and sort of saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” and, “No, no, no,” into this sort of giant microphone. It seems to be timelessly funny, that. It’s adorable."

"It’s this old Hollywood musical variety show type of thing. Really epic Technicolor. There’s an Esther Williams thing in there where she’s just swimming and being beautiful. It’s a beauty-based film. All the money wasn’t popped into special effects, obviously. It was popped into building really grand sets, really great costumes, really, really good makeup. Like, whatever. I saw that in college. One of my friends showed it to me in his apartment. I was like, “What the f— is this?” And then I bought the DVD and [now] I toss it in once a month, at least in the background. I don’t really actually follow the movie straight through. I just kinda fast-forward to the parts that look cool."

"Is there a greater, more suggestive and bittersweet movie title than All That Heaven Allows? (Well, yes, there is, Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . , but that’s another story and another great Criterion disc.) Sirk dug beneath the surface of idyllic American small-town life in the 1950s, and the surface has never been more beautiful than in this Technicolor nightmare of conformity and the repressive nature of community and family life. It’s Freud vs. Walden, as pettiness, jealousy, and repression pair off against a bohemian vision of rural tranquility. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose brilliant essay on Sirk is included as an extra, remade the movie as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and it was also the model for Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven and Sanaa Hamri’s not-too-shabby Something New."