"Quintessential Englishness and the quivering heart that beats beneath the stiff upper lip. This is a most wonderful story about love and friendship, and how duty can get in the way of both. Perfect performances by Anton Walbrook and Deborah Kerr, and Roger Livesey as the colonel. When Theo, played by Walbrook, the colonel’s adversary in wartime but now his friend, announces to him that Edith (Kerr) and he are to be married, both the colonel and Edith realize that his stiff upper lip has gotten in the way of their chance at real love. The directors capture this moment so tenderly and beautifully it is impossible not to cry. Set against the backdrop of forty years of twentieth-century war, it is a very sad film that is also both exciting and hilarious. Churchill decided it was negative propaganda and banned it. Michael Powell proposed marriage to Miss Kerr in Hyde Park, opposite the entrance to the Dorchester hotel. She declined. A movie about broken hearts."

"This is Katharine Hepburn’s second movie, and it’s directed by a female director, Dorothy Arzner, who’s one of only a couple of prominent female film directors during the sound era of the 20th Century. It’s just a really interesting film about a supposedly liberated woman, and how she navigates a professional life and a personal life, and how she kind of stays trues to her ideals in a world where – while there may be rhetoric supporting the idea of a new woman – really what the world values is women being domestic. Katharine Hepburn plays basically an Amelia Earhart-type aviatrix who has never had a romance, and she ends up meeting and falling in love with a married man who has never been unfaithful to his wife, and disaster ensues. The name of the film is the name of the man that she falls in love with, but it’s definitely her story."

"Another one I saw as a kid and have seen many times since. It’s etched itself into my mind, both the visuals and the story. First of all, this melancholy provincial town, this shabby hotel where the Victory Day is being celebrated. I adore these atmospheres in Poland. And this typically Polish situation, where the urge to live clashes with the sense of duty, where hope is mixed with cynical despair. The way that history gets in the way of love—that obviously stayed with me. Then there are the deep-focus compositions and the dramatic lighting. And it has so many memorable scenes, like the vodka glasses that are lit and sent sliding down the bar counter in a kind of All Souls ceremony. And the assassinated politician embracing his petrified killer. And Cybulski. I love films carried by a bravura performer, especially when it’s not posturing and the character is complicated and real."