"In fact, the whole John Cassavetes: Five Films set. This is the starter kit for anyone who wonders about the roots of the American independent film movement. Seeing Cassavetes’s debut, the politically charged love story Shadows, is like watching the birth of a giant. Meanwhile, Faces and A Woman Under the Influence are searing portraits of the blinding pain true love can bring when a marriage ends up tearing a family apart. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night, on the other hand, are noirish sagas of death and business. Plus, Charles Kiselyak’s moving documentary A Constant Forge offers up the proper historical and cultural perspective on one of American cinema’s true visionaries."

"Buñuel’s work is very important to me because it made me understand how far you can go with imagination and still be so close to reality. For me, The Exterminating Angel is so real—maybe Buñuel wouldn’t be happy to hear me say that because he’s not famous for his realism. But even if it’s a surrealistic parable, I’ve been so many places where I felt like I was living inside the feeling of this movie. It’s like a documentary about society. When I was making my movie Happy as Lazzaro, I surveyed movies that all talk about how to be good, because Lazzaro is a good man. Viridiana came up as something to watch."

"For most other filmmakers, making a movie as good as Mysterious Object at Noon would be a crowning achievement. Because it’s Apichatpong, the film is usually considered relatively minor, a promising start. That’s nuts. A portrait of the collective imagination of Thailand, the movie doesn’t just anticipate many of his long-term themes––memory, the boundaries between real and unreal, dislocation––it explores them deeply, intricately, and with a radical appetite for play and invention. Neither documentary nor fiction, and existing somewhere between the total control of his later features and the experimental spryness of his short films and gallery work, it’s a unique masterpiece by the best filmmaker in contemporary cinema."

"Again, an extremely individualist author, if even, in his case, in leftist, selfless empathy; a reconceiver of his medium/genre, making a very dark documentary about human reality. I’ve seen it twice all the way through, I guess (it’s nine-and-a-half-hours long). This subject—the treatment of Jews in Nazi territories, primarily slave labor and extermination camps—is always controversial, but to me it’s compulsively gripping, and Lanzmann’s approach, whether or not you have some argument with it, is original, conscientious to the nth, and the film supremely thought-provoking. He is fascinating too—a thinker of the highest order whose moral and physical bravery equals his level of thought."

"In a year filled with epochal films—Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, the great In a Lonely Place—this 1950 noir may have secretly had the greatest impact. Every heist film or let’s-get-a-team-together caper of the last seventy years owes a huge debt to Huston’s twisting and intense thriller, whose delightful ensemble cast features a bright-eyed Marilyn Monroe (then just about to take over Hollywood) and a grizzled Sterling Hayden (who was already looking to leave the industry altogether). The final moment is a genuine heartbreaker—as is the documentary about Hayden on the Criterion edition, which finds the great actor living on a boat, seemingly set adrift from society."

"It’s a movie from 1973, directed by Jean Eustache, and it’s a three hours and thirty minutes movie based on his personal life. He tried to do a documentary about his relationship with his girlfriend and his lover and how they tried to have a threesome, and he was noting everything that was going on while it was going on and he was noting the dialogue, he was taking notes. And then he decided he wanted to do a documentary of his emotional, personal life just after it happened, and it’s the best depiction on screen of dysfunctional passion that I’ve ever seen, because it’s so true, everything that he said. He put all his closest friends and ex-lovers in the movie. His wife was next to the camera where they were shooting with Bernadette Lafont playing his wife, and they shot the movie is in his girlfriend’s house. But the whole movie concept is so good, because the end the movie is really emotional. It’s all about three people who cannot manage to love each other, and drama, drama, drama. It’s so close to watching his experience in life, that how could he manage to do this? He was obsessed with shooting the scenes of him and his lover in the real location where he had his relations with his lover. But it was great doing a documentary about his life with actors playing his part and his girlfriend and his lover’s part, but also his ex-lovers who were playing the part. The whole concept of the movie is such a puzzle. And he was someone who was very tormented since he was young, and he ended up committing suicide some years later. But, that movie actually is very hard to find, because for rights reasons it’s kind of in the closet, but you can find it on the net sometimes. I watched one year ago, I watched it three times in a row. I’m obsessed with that movie. When people say to go to an island, which movie would you bring, I guess I would bring 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Mother and The Whore, and Un Chien Andalou. That’s an absolute masterpiece that should be rediscovered, like transferred to 4K or Blu-ray. It’s one of the biggest movies that I know that is not being released as it should nowadays."