"A cautionary tale of a sexy girl on the go in swinging Rome. Nineteen-year-old Stefania Sandrelli imbues her bubbly ingenue with undertones of desolation. The camera stays very close to her and records every nuance of her passing moods in a palpable way, as she is exploited over and over while managing to maintain a fragile dignity."

"The Teshigahara box set is so invaluable to my collection. Those three films have taught me so much about the power of collaboration. In tandem with Kobo Abe, Toru Takemitsu, and Toshi Ichiyanagi, Teshigahara was able to manifest three very disparate yet cohesive worlds. I was most surprised by Pitfall, which I find to be more overlooked than the other two films (Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another). The existential desolation of this film is all-consuming."

"Ah, the days when Hollywood harbored existentialistic realists, and the entirety of America—from its back roads and highway saloons to its hinterland betting subcultures, working-class desolation, gone-wild farm fields, and small-town cafeterias—was a metaphor for itself, and for all of our postwar lostness. Monte Hellman’s career peak is easily the greatest film I never even heard of as a film-hungry 1970s kid, vanished and hardly ever TV-broadcast, even as I thought the sobering, grown-up likes of Deliverance and Chinatown and Scarecrow were emblematic of an American cinema that had finally reached adulthood. Then came Star Wars."

"The whole feel of this film was something that woke me up to cinema in a way. Before this film it was very much an Amblin world for me. Lots of Indiana Jones and John Hughes and Willy Wonka (the original) and Van Damme action movies and Richard Pryor comedies like Brewster’s Millions, etc. Then a friend introduced me to Paris, Texas. The aching loneliness and sense of lost love that pervades the film from the arid desolation of the desert landscape to the haunting strings of Ry Cooder’s soundtrack just blew me away. Maybe I was 17 or 18 when I saw it, but it stayed with me, and I go back to it about once a year. It also has one of the most honest portrayals of the loss of love between a couple, and the inherent danger within the nature of obsession. This lost love is broken down for the audience in what, to me, is possibly most quietly powerful monologue ever delivered in any film I’ve seen; when Harry Dean Stanton’s character, Travis, finally sits with the woman he loved and lost, and he recounts their story to her. Travis has to turn the chair around, so he’s facing away from her while he speaks. I assume because it’s too much to look at her while he’s expressing where and how such love disintegrated. Yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful film."