"The title of the film refers to “the gods”—in French, le paradis—that upper gallery in a theater where the seats are cheap and the audience boisterous. Throughout the film, we are the audience watching parallel stories in which the world of the stage, presented largely in mime, mirrors the “real-life” setting, itself of course a fiction shown on the screen. Through the obvious theatricality of the stage and the far subtler theatricality of the “real” story, we follow a tale of love, loss, and revenge straight from late nineteenth-century French literature but reinvigorated by the magic of film."

"I saw this movie for the first time at the Elgin Theater on Eighth Avenue as part of a double feature with The Tenant a long time ago, when I was young and scared. I didn’t like it. But I was young and scared. Eighth Avenue used to be scary. I honestly don’t remember why I didn’t like it, but just a few years later I would be mocking my younger, uninformed self. I absolutely love everything about this movie, from its cheesiness (camera as murder weapon) to its sheer profundity (camera as murder weapon). Anna Massey should be a household name."

"The next one I was going to say, which is Lawrence of Arabia, I actually just saw for the first time last year. I saw it projected at a theater with the intermission and everything. It was just so awesome, and I loved that it’s “introducing” Peter O’Toole. The character’s so complex and interesting and perverse and heroic and everything in a huge movie and it’s never going to happen again to have a character in front of a movie that’s that big, that’s that complicated. The scene where he’s getting, like, whatever is happening to him… It’s wild. I love that movie."

"Medium Cool. I’m crazy about that film. To me, there are a lot of great films from that era because I was seeing them in our movie house when I was a kid [Luhrmann’s dad ran a theater for a period], but what I love about Medium Cool is that it preempts the idea of taking a real historical event and weaving a drama around it. So that’s great about it. Robert Forster is great in that picture. Not to mention — and I’ll be a bit flippant here — the clothes are fantastic. It’s just a great pop cultural picture."