"A corporation struggling to define itself in a fickle and rapidly evolving marketplace is determined to enter a race it has no hope of winning. It turns to a team of passionate, obsessive, hands-on experts in old school methods and, with great trepidation, lets them run. The result is “Ford v Ferrari” — a film that is essentially about the same thing. Director James Mangold demonstrates that a good tale well told, with character and heart and friendship at its core, will never go out of style. That personal stakes can be just as gripping as global ones. That elegant, straight-forward emotional storytelling is a universal language. It’s no small feat to take viewers into a complex and insular world bordering on the religious and, in remarkably short order, invest them in its technical complexities. It isn’t easy to immerse an audience in a story about friends competing more with themselves than anyone else. It’s incredibly hard to create satisfying characters who, by their very nature, can never hope to find satisfaction. And it’s next to impossible to do that in today’s marketplace. Mangold does it. Even a passing glance at his ongoing evolution as a filmmaker gives an indication as to why. James Mangold is, much like his protagonists, determined to grow, evolve, outdo himself and run the perfect lap. He does so knowing he’ll never truly find satisfaction. But his audience always will."

"Man on Fire, I think what Tony Scott did was ahead of his time, revolutionary. I mean, as far as how he shot it and how he used and maximized his ability to shape a film with sound. He would loop in, like, tiger, animal noises with Lupita Ramos’ scream. He put in a foreshadowing scene, like when we first see Creasy in the cab with the beard, and he flashes to the end when he dies, and then he flashes back to the cab scene, and we didn’t even know. It took me like four times to realize, “Oh, that was at the end!” And just getting introduced to Mexico in that way, how he captured it. How he captured the performances of Christopher Walken and Mr. Washington. It was like an indie film, and then it turned into this beautiful action film in the same movie. To me it was the perfect film. It was the perfect balance of art and commerce. You could sell this thing, but again, like Dances with Wolves, he didn’t compromise anything for the sake of story. Again, how he used language, too., When they’re speaking Spanish, but how he kind of had it where you can read the subtitles — how he did that, and how he mixed sounds and mixed music. I think it’s a perfect film. I love that film. I really do."

"To me, these are the two best resistance films ever made. And each is its director’s best film. I saw them very early, and they were very formative for me. They really show the complex nature of resistance, glorifying it but also showing the compromises you have to make when you’re in wartime. I love that The Battle of Algiers starts off with that line: “None of this is documentary footage.” What audacity to be like: this is going to feel and look so real that you’re going to think this is a documentary, so I need to tell you that it’s not. It’s a way of setting the bar so high, and then the film lives up to it and surpasses it! You feel the ambition in all of it. It’s just spectacular in every sense of the word. Army of Shadows is similar, though obviously it’s much more in Melville’s cinematic language. Something that has always struck me is that by the end of the film everyone does exactly what you would expect them to do, what they’re supposed to do, but it still just leads to fucked-up situations. It’s this real mess of an ending, but it’s all grounded in very real decisions that I can sympathize with across the board. It’s rare to see a film that gets to the humanity of every decision, to the point where they’re lived-in, not just plot points."