"Le samouraï is a film I return to again and again. Like with any minimalist cinema, the less it states, the more you want to discover. Jean Pierre Melville’s film has been hugely influential, from Walter Hill’s The Driver through Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional right up to this year’s Drive. Hell, even scenes from my own Hot Fuzz are ripped out of this. The iconic image of hit man Alain Delon lying on a bed in his bare apartment with just a canary for company is still echoed today. Melville took lone warrior mythology from Japanese culture, married it with the tough guy angles of ’40s gangster movies, and, along with John Boorman and Point Blank, ushered in a new age of neo noir. It’s a beguiling picture and one to stare at for a long time. Plus, it has so little dialogue that it is literally a must-watch."

"Just Kids was my entry point into Patti's career, and after finishing it, all of her previous work made a lot more sense to me and I became an obsessive fan. My favorite parts ofJust Kids are the stories in the beginning, when she first meets Robert Mapplethorpe and they are living together in Brooklyn with no money, listening to records and making art and surviving by sharing .80 cent grilled cheese sandwiches. I can't help but relate to all of it, as it's so similar to the way my friends and I all lived, in Brooklyn, when we were the same age. But it's fun to imagine their experience as opposed to ours, a pre-Internet, pre-Brooklyn-Boom New York. I ended up meeting Patti by chance a few months after finishing it the first time. Hopefully rereading it a second time will hold the same fate."

". . . is for me the greatest film ever made, and cannot stand in any list of “top ten” because it is simply of its own class. Renoir’s upstairs-downstairs comedy-drama so defies categories that it is almost impossible to talk about it. You just have to see it—over and over. It’s a film that was almost lost to us, as the original camera negative was destroyed in the early forties. This magnificent restoration (especially of the dialogue) is as close to returning the film to its magisterial pinnacle as we are likely to achieve. New Wave critical demigod André Bazin said that this film contained “the secret of a film narrative capable of expressing everything without fragmenting the world, of revealing the hidden meaning of beings and things without destroying [their] natural unity.” Bazin died at age forty, just as Truffaut was starting production of The 400 Blows."