"Thanks to Criterion, I could finally see the Max Ophuls movies I’d been reading about for years. The story of Madame de . . . on paper doesn’t really interest me, but in the hands of Ophuls, Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and the great Vittorio De Sica (who’s not only a fantastic director and one of the fathers of neorealism, he’s also damn suave), it’s a movie that truly amazed me. I could watch those dancing scenes for hours."

"Powell and Pressburger’s ballet-oriented film of Offenbach’s opera of Hoffmann’s tales . . . as rich and strange a confection as the cinema ever produced, with astonishing work from Moira Shearer as the dancing automaton Olympia (whose absurd demise,with broken springs coiling out of her severed head, I always find shocking and sad) and Robert Helpmann as Hoffmann’s multifaced archenemy. With effects technique that could have been used by Méliès and gorgeous color art direction, costuming, and cinematography."