"I’m gonna say Chinatown. That’s just great storytelling, acting, directing. I think Polanski’s an amazing director. It’s opera, you know. It’s the biggest issues. You can’t tell an epic without a big problem, and Chinatown is brilliant in the sense of Los Angeles history — the whole creation of the Valley, and the diversion of water to make the Valley. [Screenwriter] Robert Towne was able to take a very interesting historical fact — what’d he call it, Mulwray instead of Mulholland? — and tell this amazing personal story about it. I like that very much. I guess The Godfather is similar to that in many ways; obviously based on certain facts. I like that historical aspect to Chinatown as well."

"""Among all of Orwell’s great unflinching reportage, this book stands out as a personal odyssey and first-person witness to history. He went to Spain in 1936, during the civil war there, to help fight Fascism. He joined a leftist militia and found himself targeted not only by Franco’s forces but by Stalinists intent on crushing anyone not toeing the Moscow line. Orwell’s descriptions of wartime Barcelona and impoverished rural Spain, his clear-eyed analysis of the shifting factions in the war, are triumphs of tender, hard-headed participant-observation. He was wounded at the front, shot through the throat by a sniper. His peerless moral grasp of the dangers of totalitarianism began in Spain."

"This is a companion portrait of the existential man of The Fire Within, but it is the obverse—men facing their end not by the personal choice of suicide but by literally being blown to bits. Beginning in a slow, sleepy town (an extended sequence that was once severely trimmed), it tracks men who are moving toward death on a literal and metaphorical road but whose ability to face the void ahead of them is Camus-like in its indomitability. Screwed down as tightly as a pipe bomb, this Clouzot film threatens to blow up in front of you at every turn. You want to scream as you reach to grab the truck’s steering wheel."

"This is a visceral tale of an artist (Max von Sydow) whose mind begins to unravel as he’s plagued by insomnia and macabre visions of demons. His pregnant wife (Liv Ullman) is so concerned by this that she begins to stay awake with him night after night as he tries to process his grief. This is clearly a very personal work for Bergman, who admirably attempts to grasp and explore an existential issue for all artists. The pursuit of knowledge or truth or clarity or enlightenment—whether by means of artistic expression, religious belief, or science—has the capacity to rend an individual’s personality to shreds. As the saying goes, there’s a fine line between genius and madness."