"A wonderful critical reexamination of German cinema under Joseph Goebbels. Rentschler goes far beyond the demonizing approach employed by most writers on this subject (like Susan Tegel in Nazis and the Cinema). His excerpts from Goebbel’s diaries are priceless. And after all these years he dares to make a fair appraisal of Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan."

"I can’t help but include this book on any list I’d ever make of books I love. It is bewitching, playful, poetic, and really beautiful. Ingrid Caven looks like Marlene Dietrich and sings like Lotte Lenya. She was Fassbinder’s muse on film and Schuhl’s in life, and the book creates a fictive plane of reality in between all four, plus postwar German history, plus the 1970s."

"I remember the story of Lacombe, Lucien, who was seduced by the German occupiers to be a quisling. They made him feel he was “somebody.” The film, being after the war, dealt with his psychic examination of who he was; many of his contemporaries would not forgive him. I knew director Louis Malle personally, and I know that attracted me to see his film, which was somewhat autobiographical."

"For me, this film is about the pleasure of entering into an outsider’s observations of one’s own territory. A German filmmaker comes to rural Wisconsin in the mid-1970s, and sees things that I might take for granted, and shows how ridiculous or moving they are. The emotional range is tremendous. Herzog is not afraid of symbolism. The ending, featuring a dancing chicken in a highway rest stop sideshow, is absurdly devastating."

"This crazy German took what Sirk had done to a whole new level with only five bucks in his pocket. There’s never been a more precise director working in the low-budget world. I love the delivery of every line here. Love has such small chances in a world riddled with bullshit, and Fassbinder proves that it can thrive only where tremendous kindness is exerted. Also, I will never shun couscous after watching this!"