"Are L’avventura and L’eclisse considered the superior films in Antonioni’s unofficial trilogy? I prefer La notte. The details of the lives of the Pontanos give La notte humanity and universality. I identify with Giovanni’s vanity and insecurity, and I identify with Lidia’s melancholy. The story, by Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, and Tonino Guerra, makes the abstractions specific and the specifics abstract. A work of art."

"Not since The Empathy Exams has a book of essays stuck with me this way. I’ve known Chew-Bose for a decade and she’s always applied the same academic contemplation to her experiences, to her studies of human behavior, and to how it plays out in the films we know and love. She’s now writing profiles for places like Vanity Fair and she turns the genre on its head."

"Like for many Americans, incest is a rough area for me. I just have a natural aversion to it. That being said, when I saw this film in my Bergman/Polanski seminar sophomore year, I was so taken with the Bergman way that I forgot to be freaked out by the sex between siblings. I couldn’t stop whispering the last line, “Papa spoke to me,” at everyone I came across, and I think I will start again. Bergman is the king of mood, and his actors give it all to him, free of vanity and therefore crazy beautiful."